Measuring quality in communication is imperative for social work education, practice and research, but what does it take?: A social worker perspective.

Measuring quality in communication is imperative for social work education, practice
and research but what does it take? This article describes the challenges faced by
social workers in developing a set of scales and a coding framework for measuring
quality in statutory social work communication between social workers and vulnerable
young people. By sharing and reflecting on our experiences we hope to offer other
colleagues support in performing a similarly challenging task. A large body of filmed
meetings from six different municipalities formed the basis for developing and testing
the scales. All meetings between participants in the research process were taped,
analyzed, and combined with field notes and coding results to identify the different
challenges. The research process underlined that quality in statutory social work
communication is a complex and context-dependent phenomenon, but also that the
process of quantifying and coding can generate new insights into the phenomenon.
The quantitative translation of statutory social work communication created different
challenges, which the analysis identified as four key challenges: ‘Struggling with
context’, ‘When theory does not match reality’, ‘Unforgivable mistakes’, and ‘The
relativistic no man’s land’.