What SHAPE research projects are you currently working on?
Throughout my career, I’ve been interested in digital aspects of the social work education in Denmark. This is also the main focus of my Postdoc - I’m currently working on a project on data work in relation to children and youngsters in collaboration with Associate Professor Peter Danholt, Professor Peter Lauritsen and Postdoc Patrick Heiberg Kapsch. I have a very different academic background compared to them, as I’ve always focused on children and youngsters in my research, whereas my colleagues have more experience with the data field. This is also why I think we supplement each other very well. The project is a pilot project, which is a part of a big application on data in social work. The project’s aim is to follow the datafication of Danish children and youngsters, who are currently in a socially exposed and marginalised position. We use the concept of 'data flows' as a way to understand datafication of children in socially marginalised positions. The data flow can start when, for instance, a dentist registers a child who is always attending appointments alone and has cavity at every appointment, or when a teacher registers a pupil’s failure to thrive. This will lead into a notification to the public authorities, which will end up on the desk of a social worker. The social worker has to evaluate without ever having met the child, and decide whether there is reason for concern and potentially what initiatives to suggest. The social worker will typically use a mix of different screening methods as well as her practical knowledge and experiences with similar cases. In this process, a so-called 'digital double' emerges. Furthermore, this data will continue its journey in different spheres of the social system, e.g., the team who has to decide which initiatives to launch, or the management or political level where the initiatives can be either approved or denied. In this process, a lot of information about the child is being made in either prose, numbers or both, which is another kind of datafication of the child. The costs of the different initiatives are discussed based on aggregated data, and then the children are represented in yet another digitised way. After this, the data travels to different kind of places, e.g., a school or social institution. Instructions in a plan of action will be handed over to the different institutions, and they will have to document this process as well. In all of these stages, new data about the involved child is accumulated. Therefore, the project aims to understand the data flows, and what consequences they have for both children and their relatives.

What is your professional background and primary research domain(s)?
I’m a researcher in the field of children and youngsters. Originally, I hold a Master's degree in Social Geography from Roskilde University, where I was interested in children’s fight for privacy at their social institution, which is an environment with a lot of documentation. Afterwards, I worked as a teaching assistant in a number of years, until I became a PhD. My academic dissertation centres around documentation and children’s contact with professionals. At that time, the child and youth welfare system was not fully digitalised. Therefore, I have followed this field from entries to journalising and electronic documentation. Today, algorithms, chatbots and other digital communication tools is naturally part of my focus on the everyday life of children and young people and their communication with public welfare authorities. The recent 5 years, I have been an Associate Professor at University College Absalon. I took the lead in developing a social work-related research environment. The field of social work is very varied and include sub-fields of employments, disabilities, and children and young people. Therefore, I have tried to develop a project with the ability to incorporate different sub-fields of social work.

What future SHAPE research project(s) do you have in the pipeline?
I’m currently in contact with one municipality, but I’m trying to get even more municipalities on board. The aim of our project is to interview managers across the municipalities. We hope to include both small and large municipalities as well as municipalities with both few and many layers of management. I’m also working on a survey, which will be send out to every social worker in Denmark. The aim of the survey is to get a deeper understanding of the way social workers work with data through questions on what kind of programs they use, and what barriers and potentials in relation to data work they experience etc. I'm currently working on getting in touch with the social worker’s labour union Dansk Socialrådgiverforening as they are organising almost every social worker, and I hope they will send out the survey to their members. After the summer holiday, I hope to be able to conduct more interviews. We are also looking into a period of experience sharing across the different research projects in ‘Digital Citizenship’, because we’re working on a large project application.

If you would like to read more about Michael’s research, his latest publication “Functions, Utilities, and Limitations: A Scoping Study of Decision Support Algorithms in Social Work”, is a review article on algorithmic decision support in employment initiatives can be read here: doi.org/10.1080/26408066.2022.2159777.