Suvi Raitakari

Tampere University | UTA · Faculty of Social Sciences/ Social work

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan lapsen ja sosiaalityöntekijän haastattelukohtaamista suomalaisen lapsiperheiden sosiaalityön kontekstissa. Haastatteluepisodien analyysissä käytetään teoreettis-analyyttisenä välineenä Goffmanin (1983) ajatteluun perustuvaa vuorovaikutusjärjestyksen käsitettä. Aineisto koostuu neljästä lapsiperheiden sosiaalityön palvelui...

By the end of the twentieth century, caring for vulnerable adults in the community had become a pervasive policy trend in the Western world. In this article, this policy is described in two phases: deinstitutionalisation and the 'home turn' that are reflected from the perspective of social inclusion. Deinstitutionalisation has meant large instituti...

Introduction Face-to-face interactions between professionals and service users are central to mental health services. Participants jointly seek, gather, produce and assess knowledge about concerns, risks and troubles that need to be addressed, for example, mental health, financial and interpersonal issues. Social work and health care are often cond...

Introduction Since the 1980s, service user participation has been a widely discussed ideal among politicians, health and social care professionals and service users themselves (for example, Velasco, 2001; Kvarnström et al, 2012; Finset, 2017). Service user movements have highlighted participation as an issue of freedom of choice, human rights and s...

Introduction During recent decades, Western welfare states have gone through a number of substantial transformations. One such transformation was the turn to active welfare states, based on the neoliberalist ideas of limiting the role of the state in welfare provision and emphasising citizens’ responsibilities instead of rights. Along with this, th...

The chapter examines mental health meetings undertaken as part of the Care Programme Approach context in England. It applies the concepts of epistemic status and rights in analysing the ownership of knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories. The analysis demonstrates how both service users and professionals who are close to service users...

The chapter discusses collaborative and integrated welfare as a current policy trend and defines the core elements of interprofessional collaboration and service user participation. Interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are conceptualised as relational and interactional activities taking place in boundary spaces and requiri...

The chapter examines multi-agency meetings in low-threshold services for people using drugs in Finland. It approaches the data extracts as examples of collaborative service user participation accomplished as an interactional achievement in situ and applies the concept of alignment as a linguistic device in which meeting participants cooperate in in...

This article focuses on how clients' self-determination is accomplished in social worker-client conversations when discussing choices of clients' future services in a low-threshold outpatient clinic in Finland targeted at people who use drugs. Self-determination is approached from the point of view of relational autonomy, meaning that choices are n...

Community care provided through home visits is an increasingly common way to respond to adult citizens’ complex needs due to, for example, mental health and substance abuse problems. This study explores the activities and core premises that this work entails. The data contain six focus group interviews with practitioners in five service settings in...

The article shows how researchers conceptualize first-person experiences of homelessness using metaphors of movement. It is argued that the choice of metaphors in academic writing is consequential and critical—by making these choices, researchers hold the power to interpret and portray personal experiences and causalities from particular viewpoint....

Abstract Suvi Raitakari Negotiation and Marking of Selves – Interaction and Rhetoric in the Meetings and Support Plans of a Supported Living Unit for Young People Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Doctoral Dissertation 2006, 307. This is a study of the encounters between a young person as a subject of con...

This article develops the concept of ‘ethics work’ (Banks [2016]. “Everyday Ethics in Professional Life: Social Work as Ethics Work.” Ethics and Social Welfare 10 (1): 35–52) from a focus on efforts made by professionals, to a domain co-constructed with service users and others. It takes an ethnomethodological approach to examining verbatim interac...

In this article responsibilisation in social work is studied by analysing two Finnish state-level policy documents (called final report and research report) which concern a current activation initiative called inclusive social security (ISS). It is asked how social workers and clients are constructed as responsible subjects in these documents. Resp...

The study provides a categorization of the different elements of the “recovery in” model (RIM). The objective is to analyze elements of RIM in positive assessments during home visit interactions. RIM approaches mental illness as a long-term condition that people live with in their daily lives in their communities. The model emphasizes the rights of...

In homelessness research, a range of metaphors have been developed to understand homelessness and housing transitions at the margins. The article’s aim is to apply and combine the concept of pathways and ethnomethodological interaction research to illustrate how expressions of past, present and future homelessness and housing transitions are used a...

The high prevalence of homelessness among drug users is testament to the difficulty in solving the problem. This study explores drugs users’ homelessness situations and the ways in which they are addressed at the grassroots level of welfare services. The data were collected from a low-threshold outpatient clinic for people with severe drug problems...

This article analyses the accomplishment of boundary work performed by professionals engaged in inter-agency collaboration. As a means of building authority within a particular field, boundary work is found to be a common feature of most professional practices. By analysing the talk of Finnish professionals who work in the field of supported housin...

Mental health work has been transformed by ‘shifting geographies of care’ from institutions to care in communities, in particular by the emergence of support located within home-spaces. This article studies a floating support service targeted at people with mental health problems and contributes to research on post-institution and home care geograp...

Integration – and its synonym inclusion – is emphasised in the western welfare states and in the European Union in particular. Integration is also a central topic in the social sciences and in current mental health and homelessness research and practice. As mental healthcare has shifted from psychiatric hospitals to the community, it has inevitably...

Individuals with severe mental illness have often been perceived by themselves and others as stigmatised and unable to make decisions about their lives. However, perceptions of mental illness and health care have experienced significant changes; as a result, community-, consumer- and recovery-based approaches have been developed. The aim of this ar...

Abstract This article examines care plan meetings between professionals and clients held in a mental health supported housing unit. The article asks what is discussed about the recording of the plan and how it is discussed in the meetings. The study focuses on intertextual institutional interaction. The methodical tools used are genre and the genr...

Across Western welfare regimes, policies emphasize that service users should have more choices regarding their services. This article examines how service choices are presented, responded to and decided in interactions between service users and professionals in mental health transition meetings. Choice is often associated with consumerist user invo...

This article explores how discourses of time are produced and negotiated in professional client interaction when making mental health rehabilitation plans. The discourse of linear time is dominant in interaction and shared by both participants to create joint future talk. However, the clients might challenge the dominant time talk by using the disc...

The aim of the study is to show how reported client–practitioner conversations function as assessments. The setting of the study is a rehabilitation course targeted at young adults. The data consist of informal backstage meetings among the practitioners, which do not have an officially stated or recognized task of assessment making. However, the st...

Tekesin (2010–2012) rahoittamassa tutkimushankkeessa ”Asiakaslähtöisyys nuorten aikuisten avohoidollisessa mielenterveyskuntoutuksessa” purettiin auki asiakaslähtöisyyden käsitettä sekä tarkasteltiin asiakaslähtöisyyden toteutumista. Tutkimuskohteena olivat kolmannen sektorin ja julkisen sektorin yhteistyönä toteutetut kolmen kuukauden kuntoutuskur...

Professionals in human service work are at the centre of complicated client cases. The ways client cases are constructed and the problems explained form the basis for professionals' assessments, decisions, actions and interventions. In this article the ways professionals make sense of dual-diagnosis client cases are examined. Applying the concept o...

In diesem Aufsatz geht es um die Frage, wie Professionelle in einer Einrichtung des Betreuten Wohnens in Finnland die Verhaltensweisen ihrer Klient/innen erklären, die sie als Hindernis für deren Wiedereingliederung bzw. Rehabilitierung definieren. Im Zentrum steht die Analyse von alltäglichen Gesprächspraxen in der Einrichtung. Als hinderliche und...

Saario S, Raitakari S. Contractual audit and mental health rehabilitation: a study of formulating effectiveness in a Finnish supported housing unit Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 321–329 © 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare. Mental health NGOs in Western Europe are increa...

This paper studies the construction of ethics in interactions between professionals in meetings, in relation to the rationing of resources. The research context is a supported housing unit targeted at clients with mental health and substance abuse problems. The service is provided for a municipality, which expects good progress of the clients. The...

• Summary: The article studies how professionals working in a Finnish supported housing unit explain the behaviour of clients which they define as troublesome in regard to rehabilitation expectations. The clients of the unit suffer from mental health and substance abuse problems. The research data consist of 23 meetings where clients’ progress is d...

Child welfare practice in Finland has been blamed for being not enough target-oriented and poorly documented. In the article the client documents written in child welfare practice are read as practitioners’ argumentative tools with practical goals and consequences. The client-related plans are for example increasingly used as a proof of an effectiv...