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Many of us are more familiar with the roles of caring professionals from newspaper articles or television dramas rather than from direct contact. In the case of social workers, previous research has indicated that both press and entertainment media consistently portray the profession negatively, particularly in child protection cases (e.g. Reid & Misener, 2001; Zugazaga et al 2006).
Dr Maria Leedham's study builds on previous work on writing in social work (Leedham et al., 2021b; Lillis et al., 2019) and the portrayal of social workers in UK press articles (Leedham, 2021a). She extended this scope to consider how jobs broadly classified as ‘caring’ were portrayed in English-medium TV programmes in the period 2010-2017. The 325 million word TV Corpus comprising transcripts from a broad array of TV dramas in the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand is drawn on to explore concordance lines (n=1600) and collocates from subcorpora featuring the professions of social worker, nanny, teacher, doctor, cop, therapist, priest and nurse.
Findings include a correlation between the proportion of women within a profession and the sexualised portrayal of the profession in TV dialogue. Concordance and collocate analysis of TV transcripts as well as plot summaries featuring social worker indicate a highly negative portrayal as either judgmental bureaucrats or uncaring childsnatchers, and suggest that social worker characters on TV – in common with those from other female-dominated professions such as nanny and nurse – are highly likely to have inappropriate sexual relationships with clients. The study furthers understanding of the ways in which social workers and other professionals are portrayed in television dramas, with practical insights for those interested in the recruitment, job satisfaction and retention of practitioners and in reducing the stigmatisation of such professionals and their clients.
Speaker
Dr Maria Leedham is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Open University. She is co-investigator on the ESRC-funded Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape (WiSP).
Bibliography
Leedham, M., Lillis, T., Twiner (2021b). Creating a corpus of sensitive and hard-to-access texts: Methodological challenges and ethical concerns in the building of the WiSP corpus. Applied Corpus Linguistics. Vol.1(3).
Leedham, M. (2021a). '‘Social Workers Failed to Heed Warnings’: A Text-Based Study of How a Profession is Portrayed in UK Newspapers', The British Journal of Social Work.
Lillis, T., Leedham, M., & Twiner, A. (2019). Writing in social work professional practice (2014-2018).
Reid, W. J., & Misener, E. (2001). Social work in the press: a cross-national study. International Journal of Social Welfare, 10(3), 194-201.
Zugazaga, C.B., R.B. Surette, M. Mendez, and C.W. Otto. 2006. 'Social worker perceptions of the portrayal of the profession in the news and entertainment media: an exploratory study', Journal of Social Work Education, 42: 621.