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Methodological challenges in the implementation and evaluation of social welfare policies
- Authors:
- ANDERSSON Katarina, KALMAN Hildur
- Journal article citation:
- International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15(1), 2012, pp.69-80.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
As social reality is quite elusive, even regarding seemingly well-recognised everyday concepts and objects, assessments and evaluations of implementation policies will always present methodological challenges. There is a need to consider such assessments and evaluations in a critical perspective to investigate whether the desired knowledge is really being acquired. The purpose of this article is to address some of the challenges that underlie assessments and evaluations of the implementation of social welfare policies by presenting a rereading and analysis of an empirical study of elderly home care services. The rereading and analysis is described in terms of 4 stages: ecological analysis of institutions; shadowing; focus on common concepts and objects; and applying the analytical concept of boundary objects. The results reveal the emergence of a dissolution of common and professional key concepts and objects in these welfare services to a degree that challenges both the implementation policy and the evaluation of policy. The article concludes that this has methodological implications for the evaluation of implementation policies in general.
Framing of intimate care in home care services
- Authors:
- KALMAN Hildur, ANDERSSON Katarina
- Journal article citation:
- European Journal of Social Work, 17(3), 2014, pp.402-414.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
Provision of intimate care is a challenge for the care worker, as well as for the recipient of care, in terms both of how this care is to be performed and of how to manage feelings such as anxiety and embarrassment. In home care services, most intimate care work is performed by non-professionals who have received little or no formal or in-house training, and who are at risk of being left to devise their own methods or coping strategies. This article reports on a participant observation study of intimate care in home care services in Sweden. The strategies used to handle intimacy in care work displayed similarities, as well as dissimilarities, to those of professional framing identified in earlier studies of medical and nursing practice. There are similarities in terms of how framing was accomplished in a balance between a distanced matter-of-fact stance and one of personal acknowledgement created in interplay between care workers and care recipient. There are dissimilarities in terms of the challenges presented by the home care setting. As the relationship between care worker and care recipient in intimate care is a particularly precarious one, lack of guidance and formal training may hamper care and lead to neglect. (Publisher abstract)