Paper presented at 2010 JSWEC Conference. The significance of religion and spirituality for social work practice is now quite often acknowledged in academic writing, although arguably it is not yet so well recognised in routine social work practice. Western academic writing in social work books and journals tend to emphasise an individualised version of spirituality which is reasonably comfortable for secular liberals. This presentation will argue, on the basis of research with Muslim families about the religious nurture of children, that when social work practitioners are interacting with Muslim service users, they need to be aware of the importance of formal religion, rather than spirituality in any individualised Western sense. Although Muslim families are diverse in their belief and practice, the dominant world view tends to be an unwavering monotheism and conformity to religious texts. The presentation will draw on a research project from the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society programme. This involved secondary analysis of the Home Office Citizenship Survey and multi-method qualitative research with 60 Muslim families across a wide spectrum of ethnicity and social class. The presentation will focus on the implications of the research findings for child and family social work.

Paper presented at 2010 JSWEC Conference. The concept of emotional intelligence places emphasis on the ability of an individual to identify, understand and manage the emotional content of their interactions and experiences (Salovey and Mayer 1990). This paper will establish links between the concept of emotional intelligence and a potential role within social work practice. It will be argued that awareness of the emotional content of social work practice is congruent with 21st century social work principles such as the promotion of service user involvement in the services they receive. The potentially uneasy relationship between emotions and effective decision making will be explored. The familiar paradigm that emotions cloud judgements will be challenged and a case will be made to suggest that emotions are inextricably linked to thought processes and in turn we can begin to develop a view that the construct of emotional intelligence has a resonance in practice. There are many interesting parallels between emotional intelligence and the concept of the reflective practitioner. These will be explored and supervision will be highlighted as a key forum to develop the expression of emotions in practice. Reference Salovey, P. & Mayer, J.D. (1990). 'Emotional intelligence. Imagination', Cognition, and Personality (9) 185-211