Suchergebnisse

The subject of this case is a qualitative comparative case study of three organizations that employ social workers and lawyers. This work grew out of a desire to understand the discrepancy between my positive experience as a social worker in a legal aid clinic and the negative portrayal of this professional collaboration in the academic literature. The limited body of writing on the topic was largely theoretical. I was interested in exploring this collaboration in its organizational context to augment these conceptual views with empirical data. Case study was deemed an appropriate method for this research because (1) it is a well-accepted method in organizational research, (2) it is especially useful for investigating a phenomenon such as social worker/lawyer collaboration in its context, and (3) it has particular value in situations where there is a limited body of knowledge and the potential for a new theoretical framework. Qualitative interview, observation, and document data collected from the three organizations were coded and analyzed with the assistance of the qualitative data analysis software package N6. Data analysis began with atheoretical free coding and moved on to theoretically based tree coding of a priori constructs. These processes resulted in themes related to the role of the social worker in legal settings and a new theoretical conceptualization of the collaborative relationship, which were validated through iterative and complementary data analysis strategies.