Social work communication with parents who are practising Christians: An empirical study

Given Britain’s religious, spiritual, and secular diversity, and national legislation and policy directives such as The Children Act 1989 and Working Together to Safeguard Children, this empirical study addressed the lack of specific research investigating social workers actual communication-in-action with Christian parents during statutory parenting assessment. The research deployed the two complementary theoretical frameworks of critical realism and worldview studies to generate deep understanding of communication. Thick descriptions of the communication-act, social-worker-with-Christian-parent-communication, and the attendant meanings attributed to this event by study participants, were generated from substantive data obtained from a) a Forum Theatre performance delivered to 31 volunteering qualifying and qualified social workers, and from b) unstructured qualitative interviews with 12 volunteering Christian parents. Analytic tactics from grounded theory were deployed to conduct the retroductive analysis. Key findings identified some shared social-worker-withChristian-parent understandings. However, generally, Christian parents were so mistrustful about revealing ontological commitments to their Christian living/parenting praxis that they altered their language - a wariness worsened by the social workers’ absenting of Christian belief-talk through using formulaic strategies.