Presenting documents to clients in Social Work encounters

Abstract

In service encounters between social workers and clients, professionals introduce clients to specific bureaucratic procedures required by the institution and provide assistance in handling problems related to their institutional affairs. Here, paper-based documents are treated by the participants as relevant objects containing important textual information about clients’ rights and obligations, and duly presented by professionals to clients so to inform them of relevant matters at hand. Based on a corpus of video recordings of Social Work encounters in Portugal, and taking a multimodal conversation analytical approach, this study examines how social workers present paper documents to clients and how, through talk and bodily conduct, they ensure clients’ ability to inspect and make sense of relevant information, managing practical problems concerning clients’ access to documents and knowledge of the information contained therein.