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Life story work and social work practice: a case study with ex-prisoners labelled as having an intellectual disability
- Authors:
- ELLEM Kathleen Alicia, WILSON Jill
- Journal article citation:
- Australian Social Work, 63(1), March 2010, pp.67-82.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
Social workers need to develop interviewing, assessment and recording practices that give precedent to the worldview of service users, if they are to truly understand and respond effectively to people's lives. One such way of doing this is by adopting a life story approach to working with vulnerable people. Life story work has been found to be particularly useful for people with intellectual disability. The life story approach outlined in this article explores the prison and post-prison experiences of adults in Queensland who had been labelled as having an intellectual disability. Several in-depth and largely unstructured interviews were held with 10 ex-prisoners, enabling them to describe their experiences in the correctional system and beyond and the resources and strategies used to survive such experiences. This article focuses on the methodological considerations of engaging in life story research with ex-prisoners with intellectual disability, and its usefulness in social work practice. It describes the following issues: communicative issues, context of interviews, expressive difficulties, a concrete frame of reference, submissiveness and lack of self esteem, credibility of interview responses, lack of detail in accounts, researcher’s influence, communicative tools and strategies, building relationships, sequence of events, using a support person, and disengaging with participants. It concludes that eliciting the stories of vulnerable people, such as people with intellectual disability, resonates with the profession’s commitment to social justice and to liberating the voices of people who traditionally have been silenced by society.