The Use of Emotions in Social Work Practice

This thesis explores the explicit and implicit use of emotions in social work practice and the ways in which social workers’ emotions interact with formal theory and practice to create knowledge for practice. It describes the practices of 10 expert social workers with extensive experience in working in relationship-oriented models. The social workers live and work in three Australian cities. The descriptions of their practices are drawn from indepth interviews with the social workers. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to guide the research inquiry. Findings from the study were interpreted using the social work practice theory of relationship-based social work and the sociological theories of the emotional self and emotional labour. The findings are presented in three chapters exploring four major themes: • Descriptions of social work practice, including participants’ understandings of the theoretical and practice frames that inform their work, and the credentialing of their expertise in social work practice. • Participants’ expressed views on the place of emotions in accountable and ethical social work practice, plus their descriptions of the ways they work with emotions in practice. • Participants’ understandings of their emotional self and its influence on the ways in which they implement their practice. • Participants’ descriptions of the characteristics of their emotional labour, including the ways their emotions and emotional self interact with theory and ethics to create the labour of social work practice. The study revisits a central concern in the social work literature — the place of emotions and tacit forms of knowledge in expert practice. It concludes, from a practitioner perspective, that emotions and emotive knowledge hold a central position in practice. The findings have implications for understanding what constitutes useful and necessary knowledge for practice, as well as suggesting new perspectives on the training and supervision of social workers on emotion and its use in practice. The findings suggest that an ability to work competently and intelligently with emotions, including making use of the knowledge gleaned from one’s own emotions in explicit and conscious ways, is part of expert social work practice