2nd symposium at NTNU in Trondheim – highlights from two great days with the NORWEL-community

Norway has a sophisticated system in place for maintaining high standards for research ethics. Vidar Enebakk, former head of the National Research Ethics Committees in Social Sciences and Humanities, provided an overview over the system for safeguarding research ethics in Norway, with a special emphasis on the Research Ethics guidelines for social sciences and Humanities and their implications for research in social work and child protection. Vidar pointed out that the final and most important responsibility for research ethics has to be ensured by the researchers themselves.

Some methodological approaches are particularly challenging, with regard to research ethics. This is true, for instance, when the roles of researcher and participants become blurred. Professor at Durham University in the United Kingdom, Sarah Banks, looked closely at the ethical consequences inherent in participatory action research (PAR), where all involved at the same time are researcher, researched and proponents for action. Sarah also provided real life examples for challenges when it comes to publish results from PAR in established scientific journals.

Shimron Mohd, counsellor at Landsforeningen for barnvernsbarn, argued for the need for research-based knowledge as a precondition for realizing the mandate of child welfare services; that is, to safeguard the best of the child. At the same time, Shimron cautioned the audience for ethical dilemmas that easily can occur when children, particularly with experiences from being under care from child welfare services participate in research.

The need for closer cooperation between research and practice is hardly controversial. But how to achieve such close cooperation? Marit Hovdal leads the project Universitetskommunen 3.0, a cooperation between the municipality of Trondheim and NTNU. Marit introduced this innovative approach to strengthen the cooperation between the various public services and the university located in the city, and discussed experiences related to ethical questions that arise when doing research in different sectors of a local administration.

An interesting end of the day was the lecture of Professor Hilde Marie Thrana at NTNU. Hilde traced research ethics and the holistic social foundation of social work back to the work of Baruch de Spinoza and Arne Næss. She asked the question of social political and societal processes lead us to losing the ambition for holistic social work out of sight.

Day 2 of the symposium was dedicated to discussing examples from the ongoing research of students in NORWEL. In four workshops, twelve of the 50 NORWEL PhD-students presented to and discussed with the audience parts of their ongoing research in different fields of social work and child welfare in Norway, Finland and Malawi.

In the final session of the symposium, students, staff and members of the International Advisory Board evaluated their experiences after the first two years of the school’s lifetime. Lessons learned so far were that the school was very well received among PhD students researching topics in social work and child welfare.

Several participants pointed out that NORWEL in a relatively short time has succeeded in its ambition to support junior researchers in our subject fields in Norway and beyond. Good to hear was also the feedback from members of the International Advisory Board that the NORWEL-model is being recognized outside of Norway.

Symposia and PhD-courses aside, most of the school’s activities are organized digitally. A lesson learned was that online meetings are valuable, but that more opportunities for meetings in person are much desired.

We in the NORWEL team will take these lessons to heart and promise to do our best to continue making NORWEL a significant force in supporting junior researchers in social work.

The next symposium will take place in November 2026 at UiT in Tromsø. Please follow our website at https://norwel.no/.