‘Social Workers Failed to Heed Warnings’: A Text-Based Study of How a Profession is Portrayed in UK Newspapers

Abstract

Previous research has indicated that social workers are portrayed negatively in the UK press, particularly in child protection cases. But what is the nature of this negativity? And are social workers also mentioned in more positive contexts? To explore these questions, a collection of three months of newspaper articles was compiled (early May to early August 2019), using the seed term ‘social worker(s)’. Almost 1,000 occurrences were located and categorised as ‘positive’ (6 per cent of instances), ‘negative’ (25 per cent) or ‘neutral’ (69 per cent). Further classification of negative instances indicates these concern social workers’ perceived failure to act rather than perceived over-zealous behaviour (ratio 5:2). Findings also suggest that the press tend to hold social workers to a higher moral standard in their everyday lives than is the case for other members of society. Understanding how social workers are portrayed in the press is important for practitioners in terms of recruitment, job satisfaction and retention. In addition, as newspapers are the major source of information on social work for members of the public, greater awareness could reduce the societal tendency towards finding individuals to blame.

News Media Representations of Social Service Agencies in Singapore During COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Finally, the many client groups represented in the news -both in the pre-pandemic and pandemic period -represent the complexity of issues and the diverse client groups that SSAs in Singapore engage with and deliver services to. This challenges the conclusions present in other literature of other countries suggesting that media news were mostly focused on social services working with children, particularly of children in child protection situations (e.g., Leedham, 2021).…”

“…Why are news media representations of SSAs important? Understanding news media representations of social services and social service professionals has been an area of interest in many western countries such as the United Kingdom (UK), Sweden, Ireland, and the United States (Blomberg, 2019;Cordoba, 2017;Gaughan & Garrett, 2012;Leedham, 2021;Reid & Misener, 2001;Staniforth & Beddoe, 2017;Zugazaga et al, 2006). A positive media portrayal of social services could influence SSAs' effectiveness in service delivery and engagements (Reid & Misener, 2001), especially since most people do not often come into contact with social service professionals such as social workers and counsellors (Zugazaga et al, 2006).…”

“…The social work profession, for instance, has long been concerned with how it is represented in the media as this can potentially influence service effectiveness, their engagements with client, staff retention, funding for services, and staff recruitment (Legood et al, 2016;Zugazaga et al, 2006). Media representations of the social work profession can have an impact on the conduct and professional practice of social work and influence the public esteem in which social workers are held (e.g., child protection services; Leedham, 2021). By informing and influencing the mood of public opinion, media portrayal may ultimately affect social policy concerning social services, social service professionals, and their clients.…”

“…I took a broad descriptive approach in understanding the representations of SSAs in the news during the pandemic rather than on specific cases or critical discourse analysis of the role of SSAs. This study used a methodology of corpus linguistics, that is, computer-based empirical analyses of language use by employing large collections of written text (Leedham, 2021), to quantitatively answer the following questions:…”

“…To understand what topics news on SSAs reported on, I manually read 1,470 sentences (from 829 articles or 75% of the corpus) and categorized news topic(s) for every instance. The classification was guided by existing studies that used qualitative thematic approaches to analyze news portrayal of social services (e.g., Leedham, 2021;Blomberg, 2019).…”