Imagined interactions of social workers in social work with families: how and why the practitioners talk to themselves?

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to understand the nature of imagined interactions among social workers in the child protection and to determine the implications for their social work. In the current social work social workers do not have enough space for reflection and this takes place mainly in their minds, often through ideas about (past or future) interactions between the worker and the client, through imagined interactions. However, these imagined interactions have not received sufficient research attention in social work in the past. Within the framework of the qualitative research two basic missions of imagined interactions were discovered in terms of the constructivist grounded theory. They were the intersubjective-creative and the subjective-emancipatory missions, within which there were other specific functions. The discovered nature of the imagined interactions is discussed.