ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses social work accounts in terms of two key concepts from the review of narrative theory: story structure and the role of the reader. It examines several social work documents for features of story structure and story recognition and investigates how stories are interactionally accomplished by constructing readers and discusses the same social work accounts. Case notes are a series of entries in a file, recording visits, phone calls, reports and letters on a family, completed on various occasions by different social workers. A dialogic approach to analysing texts is linked to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and acknowledges the interactive but evaluative nature of language. Social work accounts are active texts with different audiences and potentially critical readers. Social work reports are handed to the judge or passed round at case conference to be read in silence. The construction of the reader in social work texts is seen as more complex than is suggested in scientific texts.
