ABSTRACT
This chapter investigats the textuality of social work accounts by looking at how entities are constructed as factual and endowed with attributes. It discusses how social workers organise accounts which explain and weigh up the significance of 'facts' and at the same time produce a story which displays the authority and entitlement of the storyteller. One of the problems of investigating fact construction is that something becomes a fact when its construction is no longer debated. Whilst fact construction might aim at 'out-there-ness', the methods used to achieve this may trade on personal agency. Displaying the attributes and status of the storyteller and their right to tell stories are important issues in substantiating 'facts' and creating strong texts. In contrast to low risk cases, there is no reluctance to offer background circumstances and character depictions where the case is allocated to a social worker, formulated as serious and long term contact is envisaged.
