Making home visits: Creativity and the embodied practices of home visiting in social work and child protection.

Harry Ferguson

doi:10.1177/1473325016656751

Abstract

Although the home is the most common place where social work goes on, research has largely ignored the home visit. Drawing on a participant observation study of child protection work, this article reveals the complex hidden practices of social work on home visits. It is argued that home visits do not simply involve an extension of the social work organisation, policies and procedures into the domestic domain but the home constitutes a distinct sphere of practice and experience in its own right. Home visiting is shown to be a deeply embodied practice in which all the senses and emotions come into play and movement is central. Through the use of creativity, craft and improvisation practitioners ‘make’ home visits by skilfully enacting a series of transitions from the office to the doorstep, and into the house, where complex interactions with service users and their domestic space and other objects occur. Looking around houses and working with children alone in their bedrooms were common. Drawing upon sensory and mobile methods and a material culture studies approach, the article shows how effective practice was sometimes blocked and also how the home was skilfully negotiated, moved around and creatively used by social workers to ensure parents were engaged with and children seen, held and kept safe.

Highlights

The home is the most common place where social work goes on, research has largely ignored the home visit
Because the literature largely ignores the importance of space and the places where practice goes on (Jeyasingham, 2014) and great emphasis is placed on the power of organisational culture, managers and extensive bureaucratic tasks to shape what social workers do (Broadhurst et al, 2010), there seems to be an assumption that home visits essentially involve an extension of the social work organisation, policies and procedures into the domestic domain
Home visiting is shown to be a deeply embodied practice in which all the senses and emotions come into play and movement is central (Ferguson, 2004, 2008)

Summary

Introduction

The home is the most common place where social work goes on, research has largely ignored the home visit. This article seeks to correct for this neglect with respect to social work by drawing on the findings from ethnographic research, in which I observed social workers on home visits and audio-recorded their encounters with children and parents in cases where there were child protection concerns. Home visits require mobile embodied performances (Jenson, 2013; Urry, 2007) The article makes these arguments by, first, outlining the research study and following the flow of the home visit as it is done, moving with practitioners from the office to the home, across the doorstep and into families’ most intimate spaces, making sense of workers’ experiences and emotions as they struggle to adjust to the home, the atmospheres, feel of it, smells, sounds within it and craft meaningful and effective social work and child protection practices. The recruitment methods, informed consent and other sensitive ethical issues that arose are analysed at length elsewhere (Ferguson, 2016a)

Objectives

Conclusion