The Social Worker, the Client and the Social Anthropologist

Abstract

City Centre Project has been working with drifting and homeless young people and we considered it important to study not just the clients, but also the project workers. The discipline and methods of social anthropology appeared to offer unique advantages in this attempt. However, in the course of our fieldwork, we encountered situations which led us to question the validity of using participant observation with clients, and to explore the tensions between social workers and academic researchers. We then altered our methods for gathering data, and realized that our experience had important implications for researchers considering the use of qualitative methods in a social work setting. This article is our first attempt to generalize from our particular experience, and to raise questions about power relations among the parties to research and action.