© British Association of Social Workers
Social Networks and Social Service Workers
Peter Sharkey is currently a Principal Lecturer in Social Work in the School of Law, Social Work and Social Policy, Liverpool Polytechnic. He is a qualified social worker who practised as both a social worker and community worker in Liverpool prior to joining the Polytechnic.
Correspondence to Peter Sharkey, School of Law, Social Work and Social Policy, Liverpool Polytechnic, 98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5UZ.
Summary
‘Networks’ is a word often used in the discussion of social work practice and within social services departments. It was a word which was central to the Barclay Report (1982) and important within the more recently published Griffiths Report (1988) on community care. It is a word also known to sociologists and anthropologists through the development of ‘network analysis’. There is, however, a fairly wide gap between its use within social work and its use within social science. This article tries to explore this gap and the ways in which social science ideas might have some use and relevance to social service workers. It does this by using some illustrative data from a study done of the personal networks of thirty elderly people who were all clients of a social service district office.