Lived Responsibility in Encounters With Service Users—A Phenomenological Study of Municipal Caseworkers in Allocation Offices

This phenomenological study explores how responsibility is lived in everyday encounters by municipal caseworkers in a Norwegian allocation office. These professionals assess applications for health and care services from people living with illness, disability, or psychosocial challenges, often in situations marked by uncertainty, vulnerability, and limited possibilities for resolution. Drawing on van Manen’s phenomenology of practice, in-depth interviews were conducted and worked into phenomenological anecdotes that attend closely to concrete moments of lived experience. Rather than approaching responsibility as accountability or role-based duty, the analysis explores how responsibility is encountered and carried in practice, prior to reflection and beyond procedural resolution. The phenomenological accounts bring forward situations in which responsibility appears as bodily weight, quiet presence, fragile openness, and lingering silence. Across these moments, responsibility shows itself not primarily as something done or decided, but as something lived in posture, atmosphere, and relational attunement. By attending to these subtle and often overlooked textures of professional life, the study illuminates how responsibility is carried in frontline municipal casework and invites reflection on how such lived responsibilities might be better recognized and supported in health and care services.