As part of the WiSP project we’re aiming to interview 50 social workers, to explore their perspectives on the writing tasks, demands, expectations and systems they work with/through/against…  We’re now starting to go through the interviews we’ve done so far. To us as researchers we can see there are some really interesting points being made, but of course for the social workers talking to us these ‘interesting points’ are the barriers, challenges and workarounds they deal with day in, day out.  As researchers then, our job is to make visible what is often invisible, and to give space and voice to the issues being raised. So how can we talk about and report on ‘data’ in a way that is anonymised and unidentifiable, but in a way that is sensitive to and representative of the context and case from which it is drawn? If we want to give voice to the social workers who talk to us in the project, what we report needs to look as if it comes from a human being…

– Would it be meaningful to report:

‘Social worker X told us that the system Y is a “nightmare to work with” as the developer clearly didn’t understand what’s involved in Z’

surely at this level the ‘data’ has become too abstract to be worth reporting?

– But then would it be fair to enthusiastically and in detail, highlight a flaw in a system that causes difficulty, delay and frustration for social workers, as an opportunity to recommend change and so for the project to have ‘impact’ on practitioners…?