Journaling among home care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: A promising method for qualitative data collection

Qualitative methods that capture individual lived experiences throughout rapidly changing circumstances are particularly important during public health emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has put home care workers at risk as they provide vital services in homes to individuals with chronic conditions or disabilities. Using a 6-week journaling process in which we enrolled participants at different points, we sought to examine experiences of home care workers ( n = 47) in the United States in New York and Michigan during April–July 2020 of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our methods for data collection and analysis were guided by a general qualitative approach as we aimed to examine the weekly perspectives and lived experiences of home care workers. We asked individuals to respond to our journaling prompts weekly to capture their reflections in “real time.” To better understand home care workers’ perspectives on journaling and the broader external context in which they provided care, we triangulated our data with interviews with home care workers ( n = 19) and home health agency representatives ( n = 9). We explored the feasibility of a rolling journaling process during an unprecedented public health emergency, characterized by rapid changes and uncertainty in day-to-day life, and reflect on lessons learned to guide future research on journaling for data collection, particularly for marginalized workers during public health crises, when events are evolving rapidly.

Contributing to indigenous social work practice in Africa: A look at the cultural conceptualisations of social problems in Ghana

This paper aims to contribute to the indigenisation discourse by illustrating how dominant discourses and cultural practices explain and perpetuate social problems. We argue that focussing on the fundamental issue of a cultural conceptualisation of social problems will contribute positively to the development of the indigenous social work practice framework. As social work education forms an important foundation for how future social work practices will be performed, we interviewed 15 social work practicum students in Ghana about the cultural underpinnings of social problems. Themes developed from the interview data suggest that culture plays a key role in conceptualising social problems in Ghana. Although not often, culture tends to underpin and perpetuate social problems, such as streetism, child marriage and child neglect. Social work practice within the indigenous framework should aim at addressing the negative impacts of the cultural undertones of social problems. Social work practitioners should increase advocacy and knowledge sharing on the cultural explanations of social problems and collaborate with community leaders to change cultural values and norms that have negative ripple effects on children, young people and women.

What's the problem with disaster? Anthropology, social work, and the qualitative slot

On March 3, 2019, an EF4 tornado devastated the rural Alabama communities of Beauregard and Smith Station, killing 23 people and causing direct injuries to another 97. This storm was unusually devastating, with twice the predicted casualty rate based on the tornado’s power, the impacted population, and impacted housing stock. In this paper, we apply qualitative methods from anthropology, geography, and planning to better understand the social context of this unusually devastating tornado. Recognizing that there are multiple formulations of the problem of disasters, we aim to highlight how interdisciplinary qualitative research can deepen our understanding of tornado disasters. Combining policy analysis, political economic critique, and ethnographic description, we seek to showcase how qualitative research enables us to interrogate and reimagine the problem of disasters. Rather than simply juxtaposing qualitative and quantitative methods, we emphasize how the heterogeneity of qualitative research methods can strengthen interdisciplinary research projects by generating dialogue about the multiple contexts relevant to understanding a social problem. While problem definition remains a central challenge to establishing a dialogue between anthropology and social work, here, we intend to extend this discussion to larger interdisciplinary collaborations. Situating the issue of problem formation within a broader ecology of qualitative inquiry, we highlight how dialogue about problem definition can, itself, produce meaningful insights into how we understand disasters.

Using auto-ethnography to bring visibility to coloniality

This article traces how coloniality traps research and researchers in the Global North into maintaining the rigidity of its politics and logics through the meaning process. As International Social Work continues to gain popularity, supporting the proliferation of research across borders, the theoretical underpinnings must be unpacked with the context of the collaboration and the cultures involved that give meaning to both. The crux of the article rests within the implications for qualitative research in social work—both within, and across borders as a way of promoting social justice with marginalized communities. It also provides new possibilities for transcending and translating methodologies across the fields of social work and anthropology. To illustrate how research operates under the rubric of coloniality, this article uses autoethnography to uncover the on-the-ground realities of working across localities. The auto-ethnography revealed that despite the goal of sharing control of the research process, tensions related to coloniality emerged. As a result of working in different localities, each team’s processes became distinct—as it was informed by different historical, economic and geopolitical processes.