Social work jobs are difficult and intense at the best of times, leaving a small amount of room for contemplation of the past, and thereby achieving more perspective on the present. However, Brian Dimmock, a principle lecturer in social work at the university of Gloucester, has carried out a project to change that. Recently the Guardian reported on his project to compile more than 50 face-to-face interviews with a range of people in all types of social worker jobs. The interviewees range from very young workers at the initial stages of their careers to older people, who have been in social services jobs for over 40 years; from students in their first jobs, to managers.
The interviews also include a range of workers from various areas of the country. Dimmock’s research took more than four years, and the interviews are unedited, ranging from 20 to 50 minutes long. The main reasons for carrying out this project seem to be to gauge the mood, or level of job satisfaction, amongst social workers, and to see how they see their own profession. Also, the aim was to test whether progress is being made in social work according to the workers, and to see what has changed in 40 years of support work.
One of the outcomes is that people find that the rise of the management culture can frequently be frustrating, since it is perceived to cause a reduction in face-to-face time with the people they are supposed to be able to help. This is accompanied with frustration at a higher level of bureaucracy: the amount of risk assessments, incident forms and other types of paperwork has increased consistently over the past 40 years. However, there were positives to come from the interviews.
The most noticeable of the findings, according to Dimmock, has been that people in social worker jobs have stayed so positive about their professions, despite the many challenges that they face. The profession does seem to suffer from a perception that, to begin with, one starts off idealistic, and ends up becoming ‘world weary’ as a result of the frustration of not being able to make as much of an impact as one had hoped. However, this does not seem to be the case, judging by the people in social work jobs interviewed in Dimmock’s archive. social services jobs still seem to attract people who are motivated to make a genuine difference to people’s lives, and often as a result of their own life experiences.
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