Professor Ian Shaw. Presented 10 October 2012.

1. My Friend the
Enemy
Ian Shaw
Aalborg
10 October 2012

2. Two themes
 Chicago
 Doing
Sociological Social Work

3. Why does this matter?
 „atomic
Burgess
view of the individual‟ E W
 practising
history
 Challenging
social work and sociology

4. Ernest - 1

What seems to you
to be the values and
limitations of the first
person method of
case recording for
purposes (a) of social
treatment of cases;
(b) of sociological
research?‟

My proposal is actually
quite simple and I
think, entirely feasible and
reasonable, in spite of the
fact that I do not
anticipate its immediate
and general adoption. It is
to enter into the case
record statements made
by all persons visited in
nearly as humanly possible
the language which they
used. (Burgess, 1927: 192)

5. Ernest - 2

strongly opposed to having
the language of the father
and the mother in the
home, of the landlord, or
the teacher, or of the
employer, translated into
the language of the social
worker on the case. The
translation invariably and
inevitably distorts the point
of view and the attitude of
the person interviewed.
Each informant has a right
to have himself appear in
the record in his own
language. (pp.192-93)

Existing case records
seldom, or never, picture
people in the language of
Octavia Hill, with their
“passions, hopes, and history”
or their “temptations”, or “the
little scheme they have made
of their lives, or would make if
they had encouragement.”
The characters in case records
do not move, and act, and
have their being as persons.
They are depersonalized, they
become Robots, or mere
cases undifferentiated except
by the recurring problems they
present. (1928: 526-27)

6. Ada


„selection
of facts amounts to an implicit
interpretation of them‟ (Sheffield, 1922: 48).
„the traditions and training of the observer
more or less condition the nature of the
fact-items that make their appearance… In
this sense the subject-matter of much social
study is unstable. Not only do two students
perceive different facts, they actually in a
measure make different facts to be
perceived.‟ She is using „student‟ in the
wider sense of anyone who is
studying, including researchers and social
workers.

7. Case work
 Case
study research, and the closely
connected development of life
histories, were central to Chicago School
sociology.
 Sociologists accessed urban life in some
ways through social work agency records.
 The term „case‟ as developed and
strongly owned by sociologists was a
direct „loan word‟ from social workers.

8. Social work and the case


The case history is… appearing increasingly in
professional and even in popular journals, and
is thus becoming, not only a technical
tool, but also a more general means of
approach to the under-standing of human
behaviour (Bartlett, 1928: 379)
‟The social reform community began to use
the casebook format shortly after 1900, a
practice that grew naturally out of the work of
charities organization societies‟ (Abbott and
Egloff, 2008: 236).

9. Breckinridge




Making the unfolding development of services apparent. „By
the study of records selected in this way students should
develop a sense of history in their attitude toward the art of
family case work‟ (Breckinridge, 1924: 4)
The inclusion of supplementary reports enables the student to
„develop what might be called a sense of actuality and of
reality‟ (p.4).
„The successful use of these records should produce a habit of
thought…a power of analysis of community relationships‟ (p.4).
This reformist agenda is more explicit in the final sentence of her
Introduction. „It is hoped that the study of the case records in
this volume may successfully develop in the student a
quickened sense of the responsibility of the case worker for
necessary community action‟ (p15).
„An appreciation of the difficulties under which all agencies do
their work‟ (p.5).

10. Sociology and the case
 „(O)nly
the eclectic combination of
ethnography, statistics, life history, and
organizational history could do full justice
to the multiple layers of spatial and
temporal contexts for social facts‟
(Abbott, 1998 p.207).
 „Fundamental to the case-study method
is the effort to view the different aspects
of the problem as an organic, interrelated whole‟ (Vivien Palmer, 1928: 20).

11. Robert McIver
 it
„can help us to study the processes of
group life… (S)ociologists…lack the
opportunity to do so which the social
worker possesses. Large-scale
investigations do not bring us close to it.
Statistical information cannot yield this
knowledge… It is only those who are in a
position to use the case method…who
can open out for us its possibilities‟
(McIver, 1931 p.82f).

12. Clifford Shaw
 referred
to case study as a process of
accumulating a mass of data to afford a
„complete and vivid picture of the
interrelated factors…‟ He also argues, in
terms typical of his Chicago
colleagues, that one can only understand
the delinquent act in the total context of
its setting. It is „particularly the life history
document‟ that „reveals the process or
sequence of events…‟

13. „case‟ was not limited to or even
primarily (for sociology at least) an
individual category
 For
social work it was linked to the reform
agenda
 For
sociology it was central to efforts to
understand the community

14. the elixir of psychodynamic
explanation




Sheffield's assumption of vague, undefined social
norms and a psychology of “sentiments” equally
vague and confused‟ (p63
as subjective as the position she criticises such that
she „loses sight of, obscures and confuses the
behaviour behind the term‟.
„Happily there was no crystallization at this level of
development in social case work‟ (p.64).
„The problem is externalized and causes are
located in the environment‟ (p.183) - „the
sociological phase‟ in social work‟s development.
Virginia Robinson, 1930

15. Doing Sociological Social Work
 research
 the
findings as a practice resource
value for practice of sociological
method

16. Bill Reid
 Historically,
the influence of science on
direct social work practice has taken two
forms. One is the use of the scientific
method to shape practice activities, for
example, gathering evidence and
forming hypotheses about a client‟s
problem. The other form is the provision of
scientific knowledge about human
beings, their problems and ways of
resolving them. (Reid, 1998: 3)

17. „qualitative social work‟
a
framework of embedded qualitative
evaluation and inquiry as a dimension of
good practice
 Shaw,
I. (2011) Evaluating in Practice.
Aldershot: Ashgate Publications

18. to speak to the social science
community
 intellectual
reciprocity based on
egalitarian respect

19. social work problems




A narrowness of conception of intervention possibilities. For
most practitioners it assumes practice as delivered through
interviewing – and more than that, a certain kind of
interviewing that easily becomes routinized and formulaic.
An unhelpful – because again narrowly conceived –
conception of the relationship between research and practice.
The „application of research knowledge‟ approach has a
number of problems but the central one for our purposes is that
it renders the „method‟ of social work invisible.
An unduly deferential and subservient conception of the
relationship between social science and social work.
A constrained view of what is entailed in social work
evaluation. Typically a post hoc, evaluation-as-accountability
model

20. Doing Qualitative Social Work
 translating
e.g. „provide the tools and
translations necessary for discovering and
witnessing clinical stories and knowledge‟
(Miller and Crabtree, 2005: 609)
 Counter-colonizing
 interruption
 inhabiting

21. This includes….








Ethnography and its variants,
life histories and (auto)biography,
visual methods,
interviews in their diverse sociological forms,
narrative,
simulations,
documents,
a range of lesser known innovatory qualitative
methods

22. Social work and sociology
a
relationship between sociology and
social work something like two adjacent
„open systems.‟
 For sociology, for example, I call for a
greater responsiveness to the conceptual
and methodological challenges offered
by social work;
 for social work a readiness to conceive of
a sociological practice,

23. Supporting the development
of sociological social work
 the
nature of a „practical‟ sociology
 joint
working group?

24. References
 Archives
 University
of Chicago, Special Collections
Research Center. Ernest Burgess papers.
 University of Chicago, Special Collections
Research Center. Department of
Sociology. Interviews.

25. References2



Breckinridge, Sophonisba. 1924/1932. Family
Welfare Work in a Metropolitan Community:
Selected Case Records Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Burgess, Ernest W. 1927. „The contribution of
sociology to family social work.‟ in The Family
October 1927: 191-193.
Burgess, Ernest W. 1928. „What social case
records should contain to be useful for
sociological interpretation.‟ Social Forces 6
(4): 524-532.

26. References3



MacIver, Robert M. 1931. The Contribution of
Sociology to Social Work New York: Columbia
University Press.
Palmer, Vivien M. 1928. Field Studies in
Sociology: a Student's Manual. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Reid, W. (1998) Empirically-supported
practice: Perennial myth or emerging reality?
Distinguished Professorship Lecture. New York:
State University at Albany.

27. References4




Robinson, Virginia. 1930., A Changing
Psychology in Social Case Work Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Shaw, I. (2011) Evaluating in Practice Second
Edition. Aldershot: Ashgate Publications
Sheffield, Ada E. 1920. The Social Case History:
Its Construction and Content. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation
Sheffield, Ada E. 1922. Case-study
Possibilities, a Forecast. Boston: Research
Bureau on Social Case Work.