The Computer Social Worker: Regulatory practices, regulated bodies and science
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social work assessments, and in turn clinical judgment and intervention practices, are increasingly framed by standardised tools and technologies that are digitised. These tools and technologies mediate social workers’ relationships with services users, while also privileging, and in turn reiterating, particular identities and particular forms of knowledge. In this article, I am interested in how standardised tools and technologies, like computers, operate to mediate the relationship between social workers and services users. I work with an autoethnographic narrative in order to examine standardised social work practice. Methodologically, autoethnography rests within a reflexive frame of qualitative research, allowing us to excavate our experiences in order to understand how our lives are ordered and knowledge is socially constitutive. In mining this narrative, I am interested in the body, and in particular, the corporeal dimension of standardised practices. I historically locate these practices, and use the work of Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault to examine how tools and technologies function in relation to the body, even when there is no direct physical, bodily contact. Ultimately I argue that there is a scientific discourse underpinning current clinical practice and I use the framings of Donna Haraway to understand the implications of this for social workers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.080 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it