The situated strategies of standardization – social workers’ form work in standardized family treatment in Sweden

Regardless of workplace, social workers today use standardized tools for investigation, assessment and treatment that, to varying degrees, prescribe what information should be collected, with what questions, and what should be done in what order. With an ethnomethodological gaze on situated action and context, this article explores how social workers ascribe meaning to a standardized tool for family treatment, and what situated resources they use when integrating it into the treatment. Using qualitative material from group interviews with social workers, we demonstrate that the use of standardized treatment tools creates form work in far more pervasive ways than earlier research has recognized. When the treatment tool is given priority in the social order, form work means constructing the meaning of the treatment by its scripts, framing unexpected events as deviations and employing strategies to stay on path even when social reality offers challenges. If the treatment tool is given a shared priority with family relations, form work means monitoring the interpretations and uses of information, and contextualizing and translating between the structured manuals and the messy social reality. When the treatment tool is given lower priority, form work means being reflexive and legitimizing unscripted use, and living with the consequences that work efforts and effects will remain undocumented. Standardized instruments are produced and handled by people in interaction, which is why it is important that studies capture how they are used in action and in context.