Exploring goal-setting discussions to identify empowering practices in social employment

Description

Social employment services support disadvantaged individuals, for example those who have been
unemployed for a long time, in entering labour market or education. A focal aim is to empower
clients so that they would gain more active and responsible role in developing their life management
and skills.
Social employment typically includes supported work opportunities and counselling. In this
presentation, we use conversation analysis to analyze recorded counselling encounters within social
employment settings.
In our analysis, we focus on a central task in this counselling: episodes in which the participants write
down goals for the client’s period in the workshop. One practice that the counsellors use to
accomplish this task, is to topicalise details that client has mentioned previously and then formulate
a proposition for a goal. Thus, the counsellor focuses the discussion to specific details, shows that
they understand what the client has described as their current challenges, and frames them as
something that can be solved within this institutional service. Another practice is to encourage the
client in listing their goals by giving positive feedback and taking a role in writing the goals down.
The ways in which the counsellor helps the client to put their thoughts about their personal goals
into words are potentially very relevant with regard to the empowerment of the client. In this
presentation, we discuss on two dimensions of the goal setting practices: the impact of the client and
the counsellor on the content of the goal, and the explicit/implicit formulation of the goal.

Period	18 Nov 2021
Event title	Nordisco: 6th Interdisciplinary Conference on Discourse and Interaction
Event type	Conference
Location	Uppsala, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International