(How) are decisions made in child and family social work supervisions?

Supervision is widely recognised as a core activity for social work. In this
paper, we explore the nature of decision-making in supervision, using a
collection of twelve audio-recordings from one child protection team in
England. We apply Conversation Analysis to see how potential actions
are put ‘on the table’, by whom, and the interactional work that occurs
before any final decision is made. Within these data we find that
supervision may not be an especially key site for decision-making. When
actions are proposed, we identify three primary patterns: unilateral
decision making, bilateral decision making and polar questions which
instigate decision making sequences. In each, it is almost always the
supervisor who proposes a possible future action, and the social worker
who responds. If the social worker is agreeable, there is often little
further discussion. When the social worker resists the proposal or there
is further talk around the future action, the subsequent conversation was
likely to focus on how it reflects on the worker’s professional
competence, rather than the merits of the action and implications for the
family. These findings raise the question of how (and where) casework
decisions are made in this social work team, if not in supervision. They
also suggest we need to pay more attention to issues of professional
standing and creating opportunities for shared decision making when
thinking about supervision. Our analysis furthers current knowledge of
what happens in social work supervision by demonstrating how epistemic
and deontic domains, as well professional competency, are
interactionally relevant forces shaping the decision-making process.