implications
i don't feel like writing this - my wrist hurts from scrawling notes on little notecards, old-school style. literally. how i used to write research papers in high school and even college. the funny thing is, i remember needing to do 40 notecards for the mickey mouse report in 11th grade, and it didn't seem that difficult then, but that's about as many notecards as i had. now i've only got 13 sources so far but i have, well, i don't know, seems like about 100 notecards already. and i don't even feel like i have that much stuff! but i guess i do.
anyhow, i'm writing but not about implications. i met with karen the other day and we talked about implications. a few interesting things:
we talked about my resistance to wanting to say anything about 'better' parenting or 'good' ways to raise the 'right' kind of kid -- that i don't want to take any sort of value position on the ways these parents negotiate the boundary. that's not what the study is about. and karen said a) that in social work it is ok to take a value position b/c it is a value-bound profession, which is true, but still doesn't change that i feel incredibly resistant to offering suggestions like how we can improve parenting... and b) she said she thought that i might be feeling the mismatch between this sort of study and the traditional construction of writing an "implications" section.
we talked about that for a while and she said i could think really hard about what an alternative might look like, that she doesn't know and that it is a challenge, and i could take it on if i want, but i don't have to. it is a theoretical question.
she talked about how at the QI conference she was at one of the workshops railing against the movement towards 'evidence-based practice' and the speaker talked about the push towards being 'relentlessly generalizable' but that we need to push towards being 'relentlessly local' and think about what that would mean for my study.
it really took me a little talking to get what that really might mean but then it clicked. it's about what can someone learn from my study not in the sense of generalizing outward, but in the sense of boring inwards. not learning something about "parents" or about "children", about "good parents" and what they do or "bad parents" and what people shouldn't do, but about these parents, what they do, how and why. not learning about what these parents can teach us about what we can do as social workers to replicate good parenting or change bad parenting... but learning about how interpretive repertoires are pulled into a person's discourse in constructing the world, in constructing a child, in constructing identity and role and behavior and making sense of the environment and the self and the family. and then not saying "ok! i'm going to run out there and teach other people what i learned about what these parents do" but instead thinking "oh." and thinking "this means i have interpretive repertoires too. i wonder what they are." and then thinking long and hard about those. then thinking "wow, the clients or communities i work with, they have interpretive lenses too. i wonder what THOSE are." and thinking long and hard about them. looking at the alignments and frissures between the interpretive repertoires of the self-as-a-person/social-worker and the client/community. important to be aware of value differences, and this is one concrete way to do it, this dissertation provides an example of a method of analysis of social values, interpretive repertoires, that a social worker can do on her/himself and on the people s/he works with.
why do that? because we're supposed to be doing anti-oppressive practice, we're supposed to support client/community self-determination, and we can't do that effectively if we are kind of blindly imposing our interpretive repertoires on others. especially considering as social workers we usually have more social power than the people we're working with (since social workers don't work "up" they work "down" most of the time), so it is easy for our interpretive repertoires to dominate. and that isn't doing our job right.
i feel like i really understand something new about being a social worker, that i didn't understand before i went through this exercise of the dissertation. working through, examining, exploring, analyzing these interpretive repertoires, how complicated they are, how conflicted, how they need to be negotiated, they are hardy but also delicate, well-worn ideas in delicate battle around fine lines. and i DO want other social workers to understand this...
one thing lorraine added to my thinking about implications is to consider the relatively privileged position that the 5 mothers have in making a lot of choices about their children's environments and how they are going to respond to them... they have a lot more opportunity to "protect" than a lot of parents do. (money, time, education). how privilege affects ability to protect, some have fewer resources
i'm trying to think - i want to make sure all the implications ideas are here so that they're in one place
-helps frame conversation for parents on universal dilemma of parenting (helping parents helping themselves parent)
-helping parents gain meta-awareness of the discourses that are shaping their parental choices (this was the seedling of the idea that grew to the more articulated idea i went through above in detail)
-'protect and prepare' as a value-based domain around thinking about sensitive issues with kids and parenting
-turning around the idea of implications, not what generalizes outward, but what we can learn from and then apply in one's own work.
-hesitancy to generalize is right - it isn't appropriate for this kind of work -- think seriously about what the alternative is
-the USEFULNESS OF CONCRETE ILLUSTRATIONS -- the illustration of problems, why the struggle is bigger than the specifics of what is being negotiated, by illustrating the negotiations of a struggle we provide opportunities for people to see what elements/dimensions are involved?
-CONCRETE ILLUSTRATIONS CAN BE USEFUL to know you're not the only one, part of a community of practice, a discourse community, strength and comfort from naming (protect and prepare)
-we also talked about who should be doing the protecting and preparing in society: parents, the state, social workers -- PG ratings, banned books, what gets taught in schools -- these things get played out on all levels in everyday decisions, and what i looked at is the most localized form of that discussion.
-given the micro-analysis that i did, are there analogous things to learn in larger steps up?
-is there any implication hidden in the complexity of how the five mothers negotiate the boundary? what's the implication there?
-the way karen framed what i explored in most detail above:
actively thinking about where you sit and where others sit
thinking about sameness and difference in your positions
client/community self-determination - as SWer, responsibility to understand different scripts and putting into action understand the implications of different value positions -- SWer with power, anti-oppressive practice
gets put under cultural competence but here is a concrete example of what it looks like.
just a thought: i could, in the implications, break down an illustration of how *i* as a social worker, would put my own values in context alongside the values of these women... maybe that's important--connects to autoethnography, connects to good social work practice and therefore to good social work research.
anyhow, i'm writing but not about implications. i met with karen the other day and we talked about implications. a few interesting things:
we talked about my resistance to wanting to say anything about 'better' parenting or 'good' ways to raise the 'right' kind of kid -- that i don't want to take any sort of value position on the ways these parents negotiate the boundary. that's not what the study is about. and karen said a) that in social work it is ok to take a value position b/c it is a value-bound profession, which is true, but still doesn't change that i feel incredibly resistant to offering suggestions like how we can improve parenting... and b) she said she thought that i might be feeling the mismatch between this sort of study and the traditional construction of writing an "implications" section.
we talked about that for a while and she said i could think really hard about what an alternative might look like, that she doesn't know and that it is a challenge, and i could take it on if i want, but i don't have to. it is a theoretical question.
she talked about how at the QI conference she was at one of the workshops railing against the movement towards 'evidence-based practice' and the speaker talked about the push towards being 'relentlessly generalizable' but that we need to push towards being 'relentlessly local' and think about what that would mean for my study.
it really took me a little talking to get what that really might mean but then it clicked. it's about what can someone learn from my study not in the sense of generalizing outward, but in the sense of boring inwards. not learning something about "parents" or about "children", about "good parents" and what they do or "bad parents" and what people shouldn't do, but about these parents, what they do, how and why. not learning about what these parents can teach us about what we can do as social workers to replicate good parenting or change bad parenting... but learning about how interpretive repertoires are pulled into a person's discourse in constructing the world, in constructing a child, in constructing identity and role and behavior and making sense of the environment and the self and the family. and then not saying "ok! i'm going to run out there and teach other people what i learned about what these parents do" but instead thinking "oh." and thinking "this means i have interpretive repertoires too. i wonder what they are." and then thinking long and hard about those. then thinking "wow, the clients or communities i work with, they have interpretive lenses too. i wonder what THOSE are." and thinking long and hard about them. looking at the alignments and frissures between the interpretive repertoires of the self-as-a-person/social-worker and the client/community. important to be aware of value differences, and this is one concrete way to do it, this dissertation provides an example of a method of analysis of social values, interpretive repertoires, that a social worker can do on her/himself and on the people s/he works with.
why do that? because we're supposed to be doing anti-oppressive practice, we're supposed to support client/community self-determination, and we can't do that effectively if we are kind of blindly imposing our interpretive repertoires on others. especially considering as social workers we usually have more social power than the people we're working with (since social workers don't work "up" they work "down" most of the time), so it is easy for our interpretive repertoires to dominate. and that isn't doing our job right.
i feel like i really understand something new about being a social worker, that i didn't understand before i went through this exercise of the dissertation. working through, examining, exploring, analyzing these interpretive repertoires, how complicated they are, how conflicted, how they need to be negotiated, they are hardy but also delicate, well-worn ideas in delicate battle around fine lines. and i DO want other social workers to understand this...
one thing lorraine added to my thinking about implications is to consider the relatively privileged position that the 5 mothers have in making a lot of choices about their children's environments and how they are going to respond to them... they have a lot more opportunity to "protect" than a lot of parents do. (money, time, education). how privilege affects ability to protect, some have fewer resources
i'm trying to think - i want to make sure all the implications ideas are here so that they're in one place
-helps frame conversation for parents on universal dilemma of parenting (helping parents helping themselves parent)
-helping parents gain meta-awareness of the discourses that are shaping their parental choices (this was the seedling of the idea that grew to the more articulated idea i went through above in detail)
-'protect and prepare' as a value-based domain around thinking about sensitive issues with kids and parenting
-turning around the idea of implications, not what generalizes outward, but what we can learn from and then apply in one's own work.
-hesitancy to generalize is right - it isn't appropriate for this kind of work -- think seriously about what the alternative is
-the USEFULNESS OF CONCRETE ILLUSTRATIONS -- the illustration of problems, why the struggle is bigger than the specifics of what is being negotiated, by illustrating the negotiations of a struggle we provide opportunities for people to see what elements/dimensions are involved?
-CONCRETE ILLUSTRATIONS CAN BE USEFUL to know you're not the only one, part of a community of practice, a discourse community, strength and comfort from naming (protect and prepare)
-we also talked about who should be doing the protecting and preparing in society: parents, the state, social workers -- PG ratings, banned books, what gets taught in schools -- these things get played out on all levels in everyday decisions, and what i looked at is the most localized form of that discussion.
-given the micro-analysis that i did, are there analogous things to learn in larger steps up?
-is there any implication hidden in the complexity of how the five mothers negotiate the boundary? what's the implication there?
-the way karen framed what i explored in most detail above:
actively thinking about where you sit and where others sit
thinking about sameness and difference in your positions
client/community self-determination - as SWer, responsibility to understand different scripts and putting into action understand the implications of different value positions -- SWer with power, anti-oppressive practice
gets put under cultural competence but here is a concrete example of what it looks like.
just a thought: i could, in the implications, break down an illustration of how *i* as a social worker, would put my own values in context alongside the values of these women... maybe that's important--connects to autoethnography, connects to good social work practice and therefore to good social work research.