Effective Strategies for Working with Involuntary Clients: International Perspectives

Dr. Rooney is the author of Strategies for Work with Involuntary Clients (1992, 2009) as well as an author of Direct Social Work Practice, now in its 10th edition, with Dean Hepworth, Glenda Dewberry Rooney and Kim Strom-Gottfried (2016). His practice background has been in public and private child welfare, including work with involuntary clients, about which he has done national and international training and consultation in Canada, Great Britain, Holland, Korea, Taiwan and Australia. Dr. Rooney has developed a series of video tapes for students and professionals that demonstrate effective ethical and legal practice strategies in work involuntary clients in a variety of settings.

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Dr. Smith has worked in residential care for almost 20 years, latterly as Principal for secure accommodation in Edinburgh. In 2000 he took up an academic post at the University of Strathclyde where he developed and taught the first Masters level programme in residential child care in the UK. He moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2005, serving as head of social work from 2013 to 2016. He has written extensively on residential child care but also on social work and social theory more generally. In 2011 he led (with Prof Heather Wilkinson) an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project on working with involuntary clients in social work. This involved collaboration with partner local authorities, which has continued through other funded projects and through ongoing knowledge exchange work. This has resulted in a number of publications, several of which have been co-authored with practitioners. The collaborative and continuing nature of this work is recognised by senior managers in the local authorities as helping shift practice cultures away from overly compliance based towards more relationship based ways of working.

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Dr. Ugwudike has been involved in evaluation research in criminal justice settings for several years. The objectives of the evaluations have been to identify and promote practices that foster service user participation, engagement, and longer-term outcomes such as reductions in reconviction rates. Dr Ugwudike is also the Director of the Swansea Service Evaluation Team (SSET). The team’s primary agenda is to evaluate frontline youth justice and adult criminal justice practices in order to promote evidence-based approaches to enabling service user participation, and promoting responsive service delivery. Dr Ugwudike is the current coordinator (with Dr Jill Annison – Plymouth University) of the European chapter of the Collaboration of Researchers for the Effective Development of Offender Supervision (CREDOS). Her recent publications include: What Works in Offender Compliance: International Perspectives and Evidence-Based Practice (2013), (co-authored with Professor Peter Raynor), published by Palgrave Macmillan, Evidence-Based Skills in Community Justice: International Perspectives on Effective Practice (Forthcoming) (co-authored with Professor Peter Raynor and Dr Jill Annison), published by Policy Press, and The Routledge Companion to Rehabilitative Work in Criminal Justice (Forthcoming) (co-authored with Professor Peter Raynor, Professor Chris Trotter, Dr Gwen Robinson Professor Fergus McNeill and Professor Faye Taxman), published by Routledge.

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Professor Munro has written extensively on how best to combine intuitive and analytic reasoning in child protection risk assessment and decision-making and also on the importance of understanding how systems’ factors influence workers’ actions. In 2011, she completed the Munro Review of the English Child Protection System. She has since been working with Andrew Turnell helping ten local authorities in England effect whole system re-design to support Signs of Safety practice with families.

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Dr. Trotter worked for many years as a community corrections officer and manager in adult corrections prior to his appointment to Monash University in 1991. He has undertaken many research projects and published widely on the subject of effective practice with involuntary clients particularly those in the criminal justice system. He has an international reputation for his work particularly in relation to pro-social modelling and his book Working with Involuntary Clients, now in its third edition, is published in multiple languages and has sold widely around the world. His other books include Collaborative Family Work and Helping Abused Children and their Families. Professor Trotter is Director of the Monash Criminal Justice Research Consortium and is currently engaged in several research projects on effective supervision skills.

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