Exploring innovative methodologies in time and place to analyse child protection documents as elements of practice

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate how a derived approach to case file analysis, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and Dorothy E. Smith, can offer innovative means by which to study the relations between discourse and practices in child welfare. The article explores text-based forms of organization in histories of child protection in Finland and in Northern Ireland. It is focused on case file records in different organizational child protection contexts in two jurisdictions. Building on a previous article (Satka and Skehill, 2011), we attempt to demonstrate the potential of how the relations between practices and discourses – a majorly important theme for understanding child welfare social work – can be effectively analysed using a combination of two approaches. This article is based on three different empirical studies from our two jurisdictions Northern Ireland (UK) and Finland; one study used Foucault; the other Smith and the third study sought to combine the methods. This article seeks to report on ongoing work in developing, for child welfare studies, ‘a history that speaks back’ as we have described it.