The research- and development project User-Driven Standards in Social Work investigates how standards are established and developed in a local institution, and how they are exchanged and transformed across contexts.
The project is developed in cooperation with Helsingung, the youth department of the Center for Drug Treatment in Elsinore. Helsingung is supported by the National Board of Social Services in implementing the "U-Turn-Model".
U-Turn is Copenhagen City's facility to help "young people under 25 who smoke cannabis or take drugs". We have been engaged in dialogue with U-Turn social workers for some years . In 2011 they established a center for knowledge and competence, where that ‘model' is described (in Danish).
It is a main point that the project is both about standards that guide and qualify the organization and its social work, and about standards of youth life and drug use.
When the social workers of Helsingung use the 'U-Turn Model', these levels are in pay and effect one another. Like the U-Turn, they face two closely related challenges: For one thing, to develop forms of documentation and evaluation that reflect their unique approach and still can be hooked up with general registers and statistics. For another, to qualify the work with "the users' possibilities and preferred narratives" that is described as a core of the approach, as "inspired by systemic, solu-tion-focused, and narrative methods".
The alignment of these two efforts is difficult, but indispensable and productive. It is this which we call user-driven standards. The basic idea is that, through the dialogues with users (in various forms), standards of youth, drug use, and family life are developed (embodied in narratives etc.), and that when we describe this, we set standards for the social work with it.
This work with user-driven standards is part of what makes Helsingung a front-line practice, a kind of prototype for how people can produce and handle standards of youth, drug use, social work etc. This research interest is then used also to enhance the social workers' awareness of their methods and their references in psychology and social theory.
The project runs from 2012-14 and is carried out by Mads Bank and Morten Nissen, plus student assistants.
Data are collected through participant observation, interviews, and close-up audio- or video-recordings of group activities.
The activities are planned in an emergent collaboration with Helsingung and integrated with their development efforts, staff training etc. as appropriate.
The project is registered at the Danish Data Protection Agency and carried out according to ordi-nary ethical principles.
Findings are reported in scientific publications, in workshops and texts in and around Helsingung, and the broader public in the field of drug treatment and youth work.