On The Fence About Dying with Dignity: Social Worker Responses to Assisted Dying in Aotearoa New Zealand

The End of Life Choice Act 2019 marked the legalisation of assisted dying (AD) for the terminally ill under certain circumstances in Aotearoa New Zealand (henceforth referred to as Aotearoa). This article presents the collective voices of social workers concerning AD, which brings together a subset of survey data on Aotearoa social workers’ responses to three contested topics – abortion, transgender rights, and AD. The authors analysed how social workers reflect on, believe in, and make sense of AD in their work. We used an anonymous qualitative online survey to collect responses from 120 participants. Data were managed in NVivo and analysed through an adapted Listening Guide method – termed the ‘Aggregate I-poem Analysis’. We used I-poems to analyse text-based survey data, privileging locating the ‘collective I’ or strands of common consciousness related to assisted dying across participants’ responses to a single question. Eight poems were created centring on how social workers framed the importance of informed choice and the influence of personal, cultural, or professional beliefs concerning end-of-life decisions. The findings illustrate the tricky tensions between supporting client autonomy and upholding protective practices, offering guidance on preparing social workers to support clients and for social work educators in training future practitioners.