Asking about violence - organizational strategies and professional communicative practice at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency

Research problem and specific questionsIntimate partner violence (IPV) is a pervasive social problem, but the fact that less than 40% of IPV victims seek help makes institutional interventions difficult.

To tackle this, professionals across the Swedish welfare state are increasingly tasked to identify and respond to IPV in encounters with clients. However, there is little research on how practitioners effectively do this.

The proposed project contributes to building systematic, empirical knowledge in this area by investigating how IPV is talked about in encounters with clients as part of the Swedish Social Insurance Agency’s (SSIA) handling of maintenance support for separated parents.

The project investigates:A) Case officers’ perspectives and strategies, asking 1) what challenges they see in handling IPV and what strategies they have for asking about it; 2) how they perceive institutional changes and organizational support related to dealing with IPV; B) Case officers’ communicative practice, asking 3) to what extent case officers ask about IPV and how this has changed since the maintenance reform in 2016; 4) how case officers raise possible IPV with clients and what interactional consequences different linguistic formats have; 5) how case officers explain maintenance regulations and how this relates to IPV;C) The relation between ideas and actual practice, asking 6) how case officers’ views on communicative challenges and strategies relate to actual practices.Data and methodThe project combines two qualitative methods: thematic analysis of 15-20 interviews with case officers, and conversation analysis of 250 phone calls between case officers and clients.Relevance and utilizationThe project has been designed in collaboration with the SSIA to ensure relevance and feasibility.

The findings will be used for communication workshops for case officers and we will develop anonymized training resources that can be used at scale beyond the timeframe of the project.

Plan for project realizationThe project runs for three years and will be conducted by researchers with previous experience of research collaborations with the SSIA.

It contains three work packages: 1) interviews with case officers to investigate their perspectives and strategies; 2) recording phone calls to investigate actual practice; and 3) developing communication workshops and anonymized training resources to feed back results to the SSIA and effectively disseminate findings.