Dr Clara Iversen discusses how small talk about weather can be an effective communication tool in social work to establish norms and communicate essential messages to people.
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Social workers rely upon good communication skills to help people achieve change. Small talk often features as part of a practitioner’s conversation, usually as a way of building rapport with someone. However, this can actually be an important element of an intervention which assists practitioners to effectively, yet subtly, communicate essential messages to people.
In this episode, I speak to Dr Clara Iversen who, with her colleagues, has explored the use of small talk about the weather in calls to a helpline for older people. They reveal how call-takers use small conversations about the weather to introduce and navigate the norms of remaining active as an older adult. We explore the implications of this finding for social work practice more generally.
Dr Clara Iversen is a senior lecturer in social work and an associate professor in sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interests concern how people in vulnerable situations build and manage understanding. Clara is currently working on projects on crisis helpline interaction and interaction with social robots in dementia care.
The full text of the paper can be accessed here:
This paper is part of a special issue on conversation analysis and social work in Qualitative Social Work, due to be published in November 2022. This paper arose from work conducted in the Conversation Analysis and Social Work network.
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‘Positive Energy’ by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License.