SWAN: SOCIAL WORK AT ALL LEVELS. DESIGNING A TOOL FOR MULTILEVEL INTERVENTION

Abstract

Social workers focus on changes and improvements in people’s social functioning and the social quality of society. To do so, they intervene at different levels: individuals and households (micro), groups, neighbourhoods and communities (meso), and organisations and policies (macro). Opportunities for multilevel interventions are under-utilized in the Netherlands, as social workers mainly focus on the micro level. Researchers from HAN and Movisie were asked to develop a tool which supports decision making on various intervention levels. In a design-oriented study, together with social workers, they developed SWAN (Social Work at All Levels): a conversational guide in the form of a card set, based on the theory of social quality and the decisive professional model. This tool is designed to help social workers look more broadly at a practice situation, recognise points of intervention at different levels, choose between interventions at these levels, and to justify their choices. Although social workers can use SWAN to identify intervention opportunities at all levels, it is not yet clear whether this actually leads to more interventions at meso and macro level.