Take-Up Advocacy in Social Work Practice: A Care-Oriented Approach

Securing rights for service users, particularly in taking up their social rights, has long been a goal of the social work profession. However, take-up advocacy is an under-researched and under-theorised practice, and little is known about how social workers engage in it and perceive it. The goal of this study is to provide an empirically driven conceptualisation of take-up advocacy by expanding knowledge on how social workers engage in it and their perceptions of its purpose and nature. This study employed a qualitative research design based on forty semi-structured interviews with social workers working in an Israeli programme that defined take-up advocacy as a core duty and practice. A thematic categorical content analysis of the interviews revealed that the social workers adopted a unique care-oriented model of advocacy, in which they infused the goals, principles and strategies of social work treatment into the legally oriented archetype of take-up advocacy. This care-oriented approach includes adopting broader perceptions of goals, taking a holistic perspective, involving service users in the take-up process, standing alongside service users, employing emotional tools and using the take-up process for relationship building.