Trying to make sense of cases: features and problems of social workers' case discussions

Abstract

The article, which is based on qualitative field research in a German family counselling centre, focuses on how professionals, mostly social workers, try to make sense of their cases when sharing their work experiences with each other during their regular case discussions. The sequential and comparative analysis of transcriptions of case discussions reveals certain constitutive features of these speech events and some problems that participants encounter – or even traps in which they can get caught – when trying to arrive at new insights. The detection of such problems does not have to be accepted in a defeatist manner. It is possible to formulate recommendations for professional case discourse on the basis of such (second order) social scientific case analyses of (first order) practical case analyses of professionals.