Talking about alcohol use: The attitudes of social work professionals and their clients

Abstract

Social work professionals play an important role in identifying and assessing alcohol-related problems. This paper explores the attitudes of social work professionals and their clients toward talking about alcohol use within the context of alcohol screening and counseling in social work. The primary objective is to explore: (1) How talking about alcohol use is constructed as an attitude object? And, (2) whether the professionals and their clients do this in the same way or whether there are differences between them. The social work professionals (N = 14) and their clients (N = 14) participated individual interviews, analyzed using a qualitative attitude approach. Both groups mainly constructed talking about alcohol use as a self-disclosure. The ways in which talking about alcohol use was constructed varied depending on whether talking about alcohol use was considered a threat to agency.