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The aim of this article is to reflect on the strengths and challenges in qualitative comparative research on personal social services. The specific methodological approach that these reflections emerge from is the application of case vignettes in focus group interviews with social workers, working in different welfare regimes.

We describe the process of vignette construction and implementation in focus group interviews, and relate this to findings in a large international project with researchers and data from Chile, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Ireland and the UK.

Findings reveal that some globally spread professional norms prevail when they are applied locally, while others are more formed through welfare systems with strong contextual norms and legal and socio-economic barriers. Furthermore, the project showed that to use case vignettes and focus groups, in order to compare ‘social work’ in its totality between countries, is really difficult. It appears more fruitful to use such research methods to compare subsectors and sub-disciplines instead of social work as a whole. The strength of the data retrieved from the study is that it makes it possible to separate information on actual practice from information on principles and system norms, thus providing in-practice and on-practice reflections.

This article compares social work in countries representing four different welfare regimes: Chile, the Republic of Ireland (refer to elsewhere as ‘Ireland’), Lithuania and Sweden. The aim is to examine how social workers in different contexts refer to families’ complex needs, how contextual factors influence social workers’ positions and actions, and how they make sense of their work. Social workers in 15 focus groups, 4 per country except for Chile with 3, were interviewed about their conceptions of ‘family’, ‘families with complex needs’, and reasoning about interventions in relation to a fictitious complex case vignette. The understanding of complex needs appears relatively individualized in Chile and Lithuania, while contextual factors were more pronounced in the Irish and Swedish material. Chile, exemplifying a familialized family policy regime, reflects a poverty-compensatory social worker role that also supports familial reproduction; Ireland, a partly de-familialized regime, reflects a supportive and risk-reactive role; Lithuania, a re-familialized regime reflects a patriarchal risk-reducing role and Sweden, a de-familialized policy regime, reflects a rights-oriented and technocratic role. Welfare regimes shape different social work practice contexts. However, to some extent, social workers around the world share a common work ethos in how they, for the best interest of the people they work with, deal with the cross-pressure from social problems and political-ideological priorities.

Artikeln beskriver och analyserar förekomst och erfarenheter av diskontinuitet för unga vuxna under deras väg som föremål för samhällets insatser. Underlaget består av detaljerade studier av akt- och journaldata, kombinerat med livshistoriska intervjuer med ett tjugotal unga vuxna med erfarenheter av placering i samhällsvård. Studien visar att diskontinuiteter förekommer i olika faser i samhällets insatser: i tiden mellan första dokumentation av risktecken och de första åtgärderna från socialtjänsten; i de besluts- och insatsprocesser som sker i tidsspannet mellan första åtgärd och den tidpunkt då den unge lämnar samhällsvården; samt, i övergången mellan samhällsvårdens avslutning och den unges självständiga vuxenliv. Diskontinuitet kan vara kontextuellt och individuellt betingad och kopplad till administrativ hantering, relationer, informationsflöden eller vara erfaren eller associerad med problematikens allvarlighetsgrad. I många fall kan diskontinuitetsproblem ge negativa erfarenheter för unga i samhällsvård.

This article explores how Swedish social workers in different sectors of the social services understand complexity in relation to the needs found in ‘family’ and in social work practice. This study is based on interviews with sixty social workers in five service sectors: child welfare, elderly care, disability care, substance abuse and social assistance. The social workers’ reports of understanding and dealing with families with complex needs reveal distinctions between deeply rooted and broadly based needs. Complex family needs are transformed into complex cases based on family composition, relationships between clients and social workers and organisational context. Complexity theory, and in particular the term transactional complexity, is applied to describe the interactive relationship in and between complex needs, relational complexity and organisational complexity. The boundaries between these three domains are not distinct, and the interconnectivity and complexities occurring in and between them contribute to the production of much of the ‘wickedness’ that exists in social work practice. Social workers may gain from this knowledge in order to unravel the often intangible complexity that commonly appears in social work with families.