Social worker - client interactions: What micro-analyis can contribute to public health praxis

Interpersonal relationships are well-documented in the public health literature for their mitigating effects against behavioral risk taking. Interaction is vital to the formation of interpersonal relationships, as well as to the development of individual identity. Interaction analysis has garnered much attention in social psychology and linguistic anthropology, two subfields whose parent disciplines are now considered core to public health research and practice. However, social worker – client interaction is a rarely studied phenomenon, and what little research exists has often taken an outmoded perspective on these relationships. This study uses micro-analysis to explicate some of the ways that social worker – client interactions resist, critique, replicate, and strategically utilize state and extra-state apparatuses such as welfare reform and structural determinants of health. The authors draw on two weeks of mixed methods fieldwork, during which time they interviewed, observed, and surveyed social workers and their formerly homeless adult clients in San Francisco. They aim to contribute to public health social work praxis by accomplishing the following learning objectives.