Social workers spend a significant amount of their time talking – with parents, with children, with professionals, and with other social workers and managers. Yet because many of these conversations take place in private, they are not often the focus of research, despite how important they are.
Over the past ten years and more, researchers from CASCADE have been involved in a series of projects seeking to understand how social workers talk to parents and young people, what communication skills they use, how these skills can be supported via training and supervision, and what difference they make for families.
In this section of the website, we have provided summaries of all of these research projects and a copy of the skills coding manual that we developed.