Professional judgements in collaboration

Summary, in English

Although intimate partner violence is far from a new problem in society, it has lately gained increased attention both by governments and by the research community. In 2007, the Swedish government issued an action plan for “combating men’s violence against women, violence and oppression in the name of honour and violence in same-sex relationships” (2007/08:39), which included a call for increased cooperation and coordination of the work conducted by the professions practising in the area of intimate partner violence (e.g. social workers, police officers, prosecutors, nurses). At the general level, there are numerous reasons backing increased levels of collaboration between professions, such as increased effectiveness in the services offered to clients. However, there are also numerous potential barriers to professional collaboration. In the present context, one such potential barrier consists of the many different definitions, theories and ideologies that exist regarding what constitutes intimate partner violence and how it might best be understood. Against this backdrop, the aim of the present study is to explore and compare social workers’, police officers’ and prosecutors’ beliefs about intimate partner violence. Employing the quasi-experimental factorial survey approach, each of 39 practitioners working in a Swedish town judged the level of seriousness of 100 fictitious violent situations (vignettes), which had been constructed by randomly selecting one level from each of nine dimensions describing the situation and the two adults involved in it. By combining the factorial survey with individual interviews and focus groups, this study shows both how the vignette dimensions causally determined the respondents’ judgements about seriousness and why the respondents weighted the dimensions in the ways exposed by the results of the factorial survey. The results of the study will shed light on the levels of consensus and variation in beliefs about intimate partner violence across and within professions.

• Author: Lisa Wallander; Leili Laanemets
• Department/s: School of Social Work; Faculty Office
• Publishing year: 2016-07-05
• Language: English
• Document type: Conference paper: abstract
• Topic: Social Work
• Conference name: DARE (Decisions, Assessment, Risk and Evidence in Social Work) 2018: The 4th Biennial International Symposium
• Conference date: 2016-07-05 - 2016-07-06
• Conference place: Templepatrick, United Kingdom
• Status: Published