A case of what?

Methodological lessons from a reanalysis of conflicts within Swedish Juvenile Care

Authors

  • Goran Basic

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31265/jcsw.v8i2.102

Keywords:

social work, youth care, collaboration, alliance, struggle, organizations, conflict points of interest, case study, qualitative research, ethnographic, field observation, interview

Abstract

“Collaboration” is generally portrayed as being beneficial to authorities, even if previous collaborative research shows that conflicts are common between authorities who are supposed to cooperate. What takes place when different actors in the collaboration meet in practice? And what is the best way to analyse this? In qualitative studies, it is often problematic to go from an exhaustive analysis of individual empirical instances to an overall picture of the context or phenomenon in which all instances taken together can be viewed as a case. Years of close engagement with the data may interfere with the analyst’s capacities and opportunities to contextualize a study more broadly and theoretically, and detailed knowledge about a range of situations in the field may make novel contextualizations difficult. This article discusses how to overcome such obstacles, using examples from a study about a “collaboration” project in Swedish youth care.

Author Biography

Goran Basic

Lecturer
Department of Sociology, Lund University
Sweden
goran.basic@soc.lu.se

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Published

2013-10-01

How to Cite

Basic, G. (2013). A case of what? Methodological lessons from a reanalysis of conflicts within Swedish Juvenile Care. Journal of Comparative Social Work, 8(2), 222–250. https://doi.org/10.31265/jcsw.v8i2.102

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