Relationaler Umgang mit Krisen von Jugendamtsfachkräften in der Fallarbeit hinsichtlich der Auswirkungen der Covid-19-Pandemie

There is still little empirical knowledge about the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on the casework of youth welfare offices. However, qualitative studies provide a number of indications on the importance of teamwork, on explicit and implicit ways of acting as well as on decision-making practices (sense-making) of professionals in child protection. These aspects were largely limited by the lockdowns and the pandemic-related protective measures. This leads to the question of the present study about how these restrictions are dealt with and the coping strategies related to them. The analysis is based on the contrastive interpretation of telephone interviews with professionals from two youth welfare offices. From a relational perspective in the sense of Bruno Latour, which does not focus on the actors, but rather on their connections and relations, some transformations in the network in which the cases are usually processed become visible. These transformations were elaborated based on the interviews as crisis-like restrictions of the usual practice of action. In the analyzed data, ways of acting can be reconstructed that can be understood as dealing with these crises. The results show that the actual crisis is not to be found in the abstract idea of a virus pandemic, but above all in the breaking away of case work habits.