‘Social Workers Failed to Heed Warnings’: A Text-Based Study of How a Profession is Portrayed in UK Newspapers

Maria Leedham

doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcab096

Abstract

Abstract Previous research has indicated that social workers are portrayed negatively in the UK press, particularly in child protection cases. But what is the nature of this negativity? And are social workers also mentioned in more positive contexts? To explore these questions, a collection of three months of newspaper articles was compiled (early May to early August 2019), using the seed term ‘social worker(s)’. Almost 1,000 occurrences were located and categorised as ‘positive’ (6 per cent of instances), ‘negative’ (25 per cent) or ‘neutral’ (69 per cent). Further classification of negative instances indicates these concern social workers’ perceived failure to act rather than perceived over-zealous behaviour (ratio 5:2). Findings also suggest that the press tend to hold social workers to a higher moral standard in their everyday lives than is the case for other members of society. Understanding how social workers are portrayed in the press is important for practitioners in terms of recruitment, job satisfaction and retention. In addition, as newspapers are the major source of information on social work for members of the public, greater awareness could reduce the societal tendency towards finding individuals to blame.

Highlights

Previous research indicates that social work as a profession and by extension, the social workers who carry out this work are frequently portrayed negatively in the UK press, in child protection cases (e.g. Ayre, 2001; Reid & Misener, 2001; Warner, 2014; Hughes & Houston, 2019)
Whilst counting by instances rather than by stories boosts the number of negative instances, it can be argued that a clustering of negative instances in a single story is likely to leave a strong impression on the reader
Using a snapshot of three months of newspaper articles featuring social workers, this study confirms that the domain of children’s care is the most common social work area featured in the press, with adult generic and adult mental health rarely depicted

Summary

Introduction

Previous research indicates that social work as a profession and by extension, the social workers who carry out this work are frequently portrayed negatively in the UK press, in child protection cases (e.g. Ayre, 2001; Reid & Misener, 2001; Warner, 2014; Hughes & Houston, 2019). Previous research indicates that social work as a profession and by extension, the social workers who carry out this work are frequently portrayed negatively in the UK press, in child protection cases Whilst previous studies of the portrayal of social work or social workers in the press have focused on negativity within news stories as ‘whole texts’ (Warner, 2014; Hughes and Houston, 2019), the current study is concerned with the ‘language’ surrounding the professional category of ‘social worker’ across newspaper texts. The study takes a social constructionist approach in exploring how press discourse surrounding the search term ‘social worker(s)’ constructs, reinforces and extends the wider societal view of the profession (cf studies in Taylor and Marchi, 2018). The collection of texts (or ‘corpus’) was examined using corpus linguistic software as this allows the analyst to slice through the data in different ways and obtain fresh perspectives whilst retaining the wider context of individual articles

Methods

Results

Conclusion