This is a brief two-minute video explaining our ethnographic research methodology. To find out more, please visit: [ Ссылка ]

We employed an ethnographic research methodology during our 15 months of social work child protection research into ‘what can help or hinder social workers from beginning, developing and sustaining relationships over time with children and families involved in child protection processes’.

Our Research
The study focused on long-term social work and child protection practice and the core research questions were:

How do social workers establish and sustain long term relationships with children and parents in child protection cases?

What is the influence of organisational cultures, office designs and forms of staff support and supervision on social work and relationships with service users?

What we did
Researchers spent 15 months embedded in two social work departments with different office designs, one was hot-desking and the other in small team rooms where staff had their own desks.

A total of 402 days was spent in the field, 201 days at each site.

Ethnographic methods were used to observe and audio-record encounters between social workers and children and other family members in a sample of 30 cases that were shadowed for up to a year. Service users in the same cases were interviewed at up to three points during the 12 months.

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