Ambiguity and ethics in mental health social work practice
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Navigating ambiguity: exploring ethical practice in mental health social work
IRAS ID
335633
Contact name
Martin Webber
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of York
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 28 days
Research summary
Complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity are familiar traits in social work. Legislation, codes of practice, value statements, and ethical frameworks attempt to provide clarity centred in ethics. Counterintuitively, such structures can introduce additional ambiguity, with an absence of definitively ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ responses potentially exacerbating practice predicaments. Whilst some (e.g., Weinberg, 2016) explore ethical dilemmas and perceived paradoxes in social work, very little empirical work focuses on if and how ambiguity of role, tasks and function impacts on the ethics of professional practice. Questions, therefore, remain to be answered in relation to how mental health social workers experience, and respond to, ambiguity in the current, turbulent practice landscape. Funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research School for Social Care Research (NIHR SSCR), this study aims to explore ways in which practitioners negotiate the gap between service ideals and practice realities to ensure practice conduct is, insofar as possible, congruent with practice values. Ethnographic methods including observations, field notes, participation, post observation discussions, both informal and semi-structured interviews, accessing and interpreting relevant archival or contemporaneous records (consent-dependent) will be used. Over a maximum of a nine-month period, this study will engage a range of social workers, including newly qualified social workers, advanced mental health professionals, and managers. Participants will be located within one NHS site and one Local Authority site, with the researcher’s time split concurrently between both sites. This comparative approach may highlight cultural and organisational influences on daily practice decisions. It is hoped that between 10-15 practitioners, in total across the two sites, will be involved. Ideally, the proposed method will allow access to multi-agency forums, as appropriate. As ethical practice is of mutual concern and importance to professionals and service users, the study design includes observations of interactions with service users, via office-based meetings, ward visits (in-person or virtual) and/or home visits. Service users will also have the opportunity to be involved with interviews, if they wish. As a result of undertaking this research, we will be better placed to understand to what extent, and with what effects, ambiguity plays a role in mental health social work practice, whilst identifying the ways in which social workers in this field negotiate such practice predicaments.
REC name
London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
24/LO/0165
Date of REC Opinion
15 Apr 2024
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion