Social Work Research for Social Justice by Beth Humphries Jo Campling

Author:Beth Humphries, Jo Campling [Beth Humphries, Jo Campling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781403949356
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2008-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Examples of critical social research in social work and social care

Critical approaches in social work have included topics such as violence (Kelly, 1988, Mullender and Hague, 2005), ethics (D’Cruz and Jones, 2004), black women’s experiences (Bernard, 2001), mental health (Ferguson and Barclay, 2002), children (Jones, 2002), disability (Fawcett, 2000) and more general social work topics (Dominelli, 1999, 2002). Here I offer a selection of examples.

The mental health needs of asylum seekers

In 2002, Iain Ferguson and Aileen Barclay published their study into the mental health needs of asylum seekers in Glasgow. They conducted seven focus groups containing between four and six participants, and nine individual interviews, seeking to answer the following questions:

What are the major factors which asylum seekers in Glasgow identify as impacting on their mental health and well-being?

In what ways do these pressures affect their social and emotional functioning?

What are the main ways in which they cope with these pressures (personal/informal supports/formal supports)?

How helpful are these strategies/supports?

What new services, or changes to existing services, would asylum seekers like to see in place to help them cope with the pressures which they experience? (Ferguson and Barclay, 2002, p. 13)

The methods used were conventional qualitative methods to conduct a needs assessment, although the researchers were careful to employ a model of research that was ‘user-led’ rather than ‘service-led’. That is, at every stage they involved asylum seekers – as key informants in drawing up the research questions; by starting from asylum seekers’ perspectives on mental health issues rather than using a diagnostic approach; and at the final stages of the process, by presenting the findings to respondents for discussion and/or amendment in a group setting prior to publication of the report (see also Chapter 4 on participatory methods), avoided very structured data

collection instruments such as questionnaires, on the grounds that they carry the perspectives, experiences, assumptions and knowledge of the designers of such instruments, which are likely to be very different from those of the respondents. Focus groups and semi-structured interviewing were chosen as more conducive to identifying the health needs and expectations of the asylum-seeker population in a culturally sensitive way. The researchers saw the needs being assessed as in the context of the trauma experienced in the past and in the present, rather than employing an ‘illness’ model devoid of wider structures. The study did not attempt to collect epidemiological information or to measure levels of disability, but treated episodes of mental disorder as a result of ‘stress, enduring vulnerability and coping difficulties’ (Onyett, 1992, xi, quoted on p. 12 of the study report). This avoided any pathologizing of the asylum seekers themselves, and foregrounded structural determinants as factors affecting mental health.

The research explored not only negative but also positive experiences of living in Glasgow and of services, in an attempt to offer an holistic view of asylum seekers’ lives in Scotland.

There are a number of features of the research approach that justify its description of ‘critical’. First, the authors set their study in a wider context by:

identifying the

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