Children’s right to involvement (sometimes referred to as participation) in child and family social work practices is widely acknowledged. While research on the benefits of children’s involvement is expanding, there is also a growing body of studies suggesting varying outcomes. Yet, knowledge of what children’s involvement entails and how social workers contribute to it is still limited.

The study aims to deepen the understanding of children’s involvement in child and family social work practices. Specifically, it seeks to generate empirically grounded knowledge on 1) how children exercise involvement, 2) how social workers contribute to children’s involvement, and 3) social workers’ and children’s perspectives on children’s involvement in child and family therapy sessions.

Drawing on 23 audiovisual recordings of child and family therapy sessions and 24 stimulated recall interviews with children and social workers in the recordings, the results of the study propose that children exercise involvement in diverse and overlapping ways. For example, a child may simultaneously respond to a question (participatory involvement) and express their standpoint (positional involvement) as well as their emotions (emotional involvement).

Moreover, the results illustrate how children’s involvement is co- constructed in and through dialogues. Social workers play an important role in these co-constructions, employing practices such as adjusting the intensity of what is spoken about and staying relevant. The practices are not rigidly defined. Instead, the results provide practical insights into how involvement processes can be continuously tailored and achieved in practice.

The results also indicate that children share similar perspectives on what involvement entails and what involvement-facilitating processes look like.Notably, the children’s perspectives were largely aligned with those of the social workers.

Finally, the results challenge the notion that children’s involvement is inherently positive (or negative). Rather than focusing solely on increasing involvement or achieving so-called “higher levels” of involvement, the results underscore the importance of working mindfully.

INTRODUCTION: At times of parental cancer, children's health and well-being are at risk, which is why interventions to support these children have been developed. When developing such interventions, engagement of the population under study in research is endorsed to enhance relevance of research questions and to enhance uptake and dissemination of the findings. Since no previous review has mapped the ways children participate in the development, use and evaluation of these support interventions, the focus of the upcoming scoping review is to identify gaps in the literature for guidance of future research.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The scoping review is guided by the methodological framework developed by Arksey and O'Malley. A preliminary search strategy was performed in PubMed in November 2020, refined in March 2021 and applied in PubMed, PsycINFO and CINAHL. Additional searches were performed in Google Scholar and SwePub, and reference lists were hand searched. Refined searches will be conducted in February 2024. The multidisciplinary research team will independently screen titles, abstracts and full-text articles for relevance. Then, relevant studies will be critically evaluated using the Joanna Briggs Critical Appraisal Skills Tools. Data will be extracted using an extraction form and analysed deductively. A descriptive summary of study characteristics and the research process will be presented, including a flow chart. The reporting of the study will be guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews Checklist.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Being a secondary analysis, ethical approval is not needed. Still, relevant studies will be reviewed for ethical approval as a criterion for inclusion. The findings will be used to inform future studies and will be published in a scientific journal as well as presented at conferences and organisations for children's rights.

This paper presents an analysis of how three interlocutors sequentially organize and accomplish mutual understanding in naturally occurring audiovisual recordings of therapy sessions. The analysis is in keeping with microanalysis of face-to-face dialog (MFD) and follows operational definitions of three-step micro-processes that interlocutors use when they calibrate new information; that is, how they agree that they have understood each other's words and actions well enough for current practical purposes. Pointing to some of the complexities that characterize triadic interactions, the analysis contributes with new documentations of 'suspended', 'nested', 'branched', 'multi-paced', and 'mixed interpretations' calibrations. The analysis also demonstrates how interlocutors may calibrate the 'tone' of an utterance before the topical content is mutually understood. The results and their implications may be relevant to practitioners of institutional talks at large, where the quality and outcome of, for instance, assessments and interventions largely rely on accomplishing mutual understanding.

Children’s in-session involvement in child and family therapies correlates with both positive and negative treatment outcomes. Thus, it is important to gain a better understanding of the clinical practices that facilitate children’s involvement in therapy sessions so that practitioners can employ them with greater precision. To address this need, we conducted a study to answer the following question: What clinical practices facilitate children’s in-session involvement in child and family therapies? The data consisted of 16 extant audiovisual recordings of child and family therapy sessions and 24 stimulated-recall interviews with the participants in the recordings. Following constructivist grounded theory and incorporating storyline as an additional analytical technique, we have constructed a framework consisting of four involvement-enhancing practices: managing time, staying relevant, adjusting intensity, and facilitating inclusion. Furthermore, by detailing some of the complex processes that practitioners navigate when they facilitate children’s involvement, our study adds a multilayered and dynamic dimension to the list of already established involvement facilitators. It may be used to moderate an overstandardized work culture that continues to characterize services that address children’s needs. The results may be applied to other institutional encounters, providing resonance beyond the analyzed therapy sessions.

Artikeln fokuserar på hälso- och sjukvårdskuratorns arbete med att å ena sidan bemöta de känslor som barn och familjer kan känna efter att barnet diagnostiserats med den kroniska sjukdomen diabetes, å andra sidan han­tera olika byråkratiska processer som ska sörja för att barnets vårdbehov tillgodoses i familjens nya vardag. Arbetet riktas mot två olika världar som är inbördes beroende av varandra, men som många gånger innebär en känslig balansakt för kuratorn att förena. Syftet är att undersöka hur kuratorn förhål­ler sig till, och balanserar, dessa två världar i mötet med barnet och familjen. Balansakten undersöks etnografiskt genom att vi studerar blanketters bety­delse i vårdmötet. Ett viktigt resultat av vår undersökning är blankettens roll när kuratorn översätter familjens nya vardag till ett språk som kan generera ett välfärdsstöd.

The article focuses on the work of clinical social workers who, on the one hand, respond to the emotions that children and families experience after the child is diagnosed with the chronic disease diabetes, on the other hand, deal with various bureaucratic processes aimed at ensuring that the child’s medical needs are met in the family’s new life. The work is directed towards two different worlds that are interdependent, yet bringing them together fre­quently necessitates a balancing act. The purpose is to examine how the social worker deal with these two worlds in the encounter with the child and the family. A result is the document’s role when the social worker translates the family’s new everyday life into a language that can generate assistance or allowance from the state.

Hälso- och sjukvårdkuratorn har en särställning inom den svenska hälso- och sjukvården. Med sin socialvetenskapliga och interdisciplinära kompetens bevakar och adresserar kuratorn frågor angelägna inom det socialmedicinska sammanhanget. Genom att placera människans hälsa och sjukdom i en samhällelig kontext bidrar kuratorn med ett samhällsvetenskapligt perspektiv på patientens levnadsförhållanden och hur olika typer av sårbarhet påverkar mående. Med sin förankring i socialt arbetet har kuratorn unika förutsättningar för att se, stödja och behandla patienter och deras närstående. I och med kuratorslegitimation, som infördes 1 juli 2019, sker en ny riktning för de socionomutbildade där hälso- och sjukvårdskuratorna kan sägas gå i bräschen. Temanumret samlar forskning om både interventioner och behandlingar, yrkesrollens funktion och utmaningar, och kritiska reflektioner över hälso- och sjukvårdskuratorns arbetsvillkor.

Children’s right to involvement in practices that address their well-being is frequentlyhighlighted, yet how children exercise involvement in face-to-face encounters hasremained fairly unknown. To fulfil our aim of identifying, describing and defining children’s involvement, we conducted an inductive microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue onaudiovisual recordings of naturally occurring therapy sessions with children attendingsocial services departments and mental health clinics. The resulting operationalisationgenerated six dimensions of children’s involvement: participatory, directive, positional,emotional, agentive and narrative. By operationalising how children exercise involvement, we render the abstract concept more amenable to fine-grained analysis, systematic evaluation and criticism. The domains also offer tools to recognise children’sinvolvement in practice. Lastly, the article discusses practical implications and presents acompass for orientation. Since many conversational elements in institutional talks aregeneric, the dimensions are potentially transferable to other settings, including schoolcounselling, child protection investigation and clinical psychology. A high inter-analystagreement, together with similar findings on utterance functions and interactionaldominance in other types of dialogues, also enhance the dimensions’ transferability.

Hälso- och sjukvårdkuratorn har en särställning inom den svenska hälso- och sjukvården. Med sin socialvetenskapliga och interdisciplinära kompetens bevakar och adresserar kuratorn frågor angelägna inom det socialmedicinska sammanhanget. Genom att placera människans hälsa och sjukdom i en samhällelig kontext bidrar kuratorn med ett samhällsvetenskapligt perspektiv på patientens levnadsförhållanden och hur olika typer av sårbarhet påverkar mående. Med sin förankring i socialt arbetet har kuratorn unika förutsättningar för att se, stödja och behandla patienter och deras närstående. I och med kuratorslegitimation, som infördes 1 juli 2019, sker en ny riktning för de socionomutbildade där hälso- och sjukvårdskuratorna kan sägas gå i bräschen. Temanumret samlar forskning om både interventioner och behandlingar, yrkesrollens funktion och utmaningar, och kritiska reflektioner över hälso- och sjukvårdskuratorns arbetsvillkor.