Echoes and ripples: a qualitative analysis of the relationship between social work supervision and home visits

The importance of supervision in social work is widely recognised, yet much remains unknown about the extent to which supervision influences social work practice and vice versa – and how. This qualitative study provides a detailed analysis of supervisory conversations and how they are reflected in subsequent practice conversations between social workers and people using services. Using an established framework for assessing the quality of supervision, we analysed five paired audio recordings of group supervision and home visits involving the same social worker and corresponding child and family. Through recursive abstraction, we identified key associations between the content and nature of discussions in supervision and discussions in the family home, as well as some notable discrepancies. These inconsistencies highlight the complexity of disentangling cause and effect within complex systems and suggest that the direction of influence may sometimes flow as much from practice to supervision as the other way around. Our findings contribute to the growing evidence base on the relationship between supervision and practice (in the form of home visits), underscoring the need for future research to include the perspectives of people using services and to explore other areas of social work practice and supervisory models.