Abstract
The profession of social work has become increasingly ‘writing intensive’ in recent decades, yet little empirical research has been carried out on the nature of this writing. This paper describes and explores the 1 million word corpus compiled as part of the ESRC-funded study ‘Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape’ (WiSP http://www.writinginsocialwork.com), outlining the challenges involved in collecting and anonymising hard-to-reach texts from social workers (n=38) across three UK Local Authorities. Using the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse analysis alongside ethnographic insights and in consultation with expert insiders, the paper focuses on what a keyword analysis reveals about the core focus or ‘preoccupation’ (Baker, 2010) of social work writing. Attention is paid to the three main text categories of writing in social work - casenotes, emails and assessment reports – and to the three social work domains of children’s, adult generic and adult mental health services. Findings include confirmation of the extensive recording of communication exchanges, differences in the ways social workers refer to their own and service users’ views, and the considerable extent to which evaluation is threaded through all social work writing via the use of lexis. We also discuss how keyword analysis can provide a set of ‘candidate professional lexis’ and further examine selected items. The paper concludes by reflecting on aspects of methodology, in particular considering the subjectivity around keyword calculation, the equal treatment of all items in a corpus, and the usefulness of combining keyness analysis with additional data sources.
Highlights
In professional social work, the production of written texts is a high-stakes activity, playing a central role in all decisions about services and simultaneously used to evaluate social workers’ professional competence
A deduplication process was carried out to tag the many sections of texts not written by individual social workers in order to exclude these sections from analysis
In a group meeting and in follow-up consultation with two social workers, we provided examples of key items used in context, and adapted the groupings according to their insights
Summary
The production of written texts is a high-stakes activity, playing a central role in all decisions about services and simultaneously used to evaluate social workers’ professional competence. Despite the criticisms made and the significance of writing in social work practice, little empirical research has been carried out on the nature of this writing and there has as yet been no corpus analysis of social workers’ writing. We examine findings from the whole WiSP corpus, following the widely-adopted corpus-assisted discourse studies (CaDS) methodology of keyword extraction followed by thematic classification of key items and further exploration of these items through collocates, concordance lines and close reading of whole texts (cf Leedham, 2015; Partington, Duguid and Taylor, 2013; and studies in Taylor and Marchi, 2018a). The incorporation of such elements is seen as a key part of the CaDS approach in this paper as part of the WiSP project’s overall aim of providing an in-depth account of the nature of social work writing
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