Study title

Data collection consists of the following 5 datasets: a) 4,570 texts of social worker writing (casenotes, assessment reports, emails and miscellaneous 'other') collected constituting a corpus of just under 1 million words. A list of the most 100 frequent words, a word cloud of key semantic domains and selected concordance lines are also provided. b) 81 semi-structured interviews undertaken with 65 social workers and 6 managers focusing on the core participant interview questions. Interviews with a further 8 additional participants - with service managers and directors, a welfare rights worker and a student social worker - focusing on specific issues were also recorded and transcribed. c) 10 weeks of researcher observations comprising fieldnotes of social workers' activities (‘daily observation chronologies’). d) 483 days of social worker writing activity logs detailing writing and other activities undertaken. e) 42 text clusters. Each of these gives a summary of a social worker case plus associated texts (casenotes, emails, assessment reports). The production and use of written texts is a high stakes activity in professional social work, playing a central role in all decisions about actions and services for people and at the same time used to evaluate social workers' professional competence. However, little empirical research has been carried out to date on the writing demands and practices of everyday social work and their changing nature given the range of technologies being used. The research project ‘Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape’(WiSP) is an ESRC-funded research study involving five local authorities in the UK, exploring both the range of written texts produced and the writing practices of social workers. The research centres on three main domains of social work - children’s, adults’ generic care and adults’ mental health. The main objectives of the study were to: 1. Offer a detailed description and...