It is estimated that client’s contact with authorities usually lasts from a few months to several years before such a hearing is organized. The administrative hearing as a part of care order preparations is an institutional decision-making situation in Finland in which taking the child into care is considered.
As the clients are the actual decision makers in administrative hearings, the listening that they express either themselves or through the lenses of social workers are examined. This study focuses on examining the relational nature of this institutional communication situation through possible barriers to clients’ listening and the practices that social workers use to make understanding the decision-making process and the decision itself easier. Achieving this, they need to find out the clients’ opinion of the case. In the legal sense, social workers need to find out whether parents and children consent or object to their proposal for a care order. Giving up a child into care is an emotionally charged situation for parents and children, so it can be assumed that administrative hearings are filled with tensions that impair listening and understanding. Still, the practices and the institutional communication of the administrative hearing have scarcely been studied (Helavirta et al., 2014). This interesting polarity is highly tangible in administrative hearings in which decisions are made regarding the care order of a child, one of the most far-reaching decisions that can be made in the context of child welfare services. This is the case even though they use public power over families while working in partnership with them. When Finnish social workers have described their work, they have talked about themselves as relational actors and very little as agents of the statutory bureaucratic system (Eronen et al., 2020). Moreover, global similarities regarding the listening dimensions of social workers could be examined in future studies.
Thus, our findings regarding relational listening in social work can be applied widely. Even though the study describes the Finnish system and procedure of taking a child into care, and procedural and legal systems are not similar between countries, the core of the social workers’s profession worldwide is relational. The study also interestingly reveals how the listening dimensions of social workers are constructed in the relational listening situation emerging in administrative hearings. The results indicate that the clients’ intra- and interpersonal as well as institutional listening barriers can be facilitated by practices applied by social workers in various ways. Data are analyzed with the thematical content analysis. The study examines an authentic child protection situation with three different data sets. These hearings are filled with tensions that can be assumed to impair the listening of parents and children because in the hearings, final decisions regarding giving a child into care are made. This qualitative study aimed to investigate clients’ listening barriers as well as listening facilitation-related practices applied by social workers in an emotionally charged relational listening situation emerging in administrative hearings.
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