The aim of this study was to examine what knowledge social workers express about home visits in child welfare investigations and how they know what to do. Sixteen social workers who work with social investigations concerning children were asked to discuss the topic home visit in three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden. The social workers in our focus group interviews mainly discussed the purpose of the home visit, what social workers do during home visits and furthermore their opinions about guidelines and policy documents regarding the home visit.  To get an understanding of what type of knowledge is the basis for social workers use of the home visit, we used Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing' as well as the Aristotelian theory of knowledge containing three forms of knowledge, that is, episteme, techne and fronesis. We found that the displaying of ?tacit knowing? was a consistent feature in all groups, as they had difficulty expressing their knowledge use.

The aim of the study was to get a deeper understanding of how social workers at the welfare office think and act when it comes to methadone or buprenorphine treatment. What role does the welfare office take when it comes to methadone- or buprenorphine treatment, what does the welfare office think about this form of treatment, what possibilities does the welfare office have when it comes to decide the selection to this kind of treatment and what consideration does the welfare office take to the separate individuals demands when it comes to methadone- or buprenorphine treatment. The study is done in the perspective of society as a social construction. The method that was used was qualitative interviews with professionals at the welfare office and professionals at the reception of methadone- and buprenorphine treatment. The result of the study is that the attitude towards methadone- and buprenorphine treatment is complicated and the opinions are partly divided..

The purpose with this study was to get a deeper understanding of how the social welfare secretaries experience the meeting with clients.Our main questions were how the social welfare secretaries thinks about their own way to behave in the meeting with clients, which difficulties/obstacles there can be a and which factors they think affect the meeting. What is it that makes the social welfare secretaries experience a meeting as good or less good.Theory used: ?naive theory? and ?theory of communication?. The social welfare secretaries emphasised the importance of respect and clarity in their relations with the clients. By contrast with literature, the hover between power and support was not found difficult.The goal is that the social welfare secretaries and the clients understand each other and that they reach the purpose with the meeting..

Animal welfare can be measured in several different ways; for example by using animal-based measurements. It has been shown that register data from the Swedish Official Milk Recording Scheme can be helpful when identifying herds at risk of having poor animal welfare, which led to a development of the advisory service of ?Ask the Cow? and the web report ?Animal Welfare Signals?. The aim of this project was to find out if register data from ?Animal Welfare Signals? can be used as a screening tool for detecting herds at risk of having poor animal welfare and in need of an ?Ask the Cow?.

Social policy has now received an increased attention in the European Union. The European welfare states experience a high level of unemployment, which the EU now tries to handle through the European Employment Strategy (EES). The core of this essay is whether the welfare institutions of the European member states are integrating through an institutionalization process or not. Within the EU four different types of welfare models can be identified: the Scandinavian, the Continental, the Southern and the Anglo-Saxon. The welfare models differ in the institutional settings e.g.

The purpose with this essay is to take part of the process when a family is placed on the family-institution, Trollbacken. We want to know what makes the social welfare secretaries place a family in institutional care. Has Trollbacken lived up to the social welfare secretary expectations and are the social welfare secretaries following Trollbackens recommendation regarding the follow up treatment. We also want to know to what value the social welfare secretary assigns Trollbackens investigation and are they able to see changes in the family due to the placing on Trollbacken. The method is qualitative and is based on interviews from six social welfare secretaries that work around and in West Sweden.

The aim of the study was to examine what workers in social services considers physical child abuse and in which way social services work with children who have been exposed to physical child abuse. The study also examines which interventions are available and how physically abused children assimilate these. I've interviewed four child-welfare officers and for those interviews I've used the qualitative semi-structured method. The results shows that all my respondents have different views on on the definition of physical child abuse. The result also shows that the municipality which the children belongs to plays a major role in which children can get help with their problems.

The purpose of this essay was to get some knowledge about how the situation was for children with overweight and obesity. I wanted to examine what experience about causes, consequences and measure the professionals, who meets children in different situations in their daily work had, and I wanted to find out which explanations current research had about the problem.The knowledge I have acquired during my work with this paper about the problem was that it was depending on many different factors on various stage in the child's life which influences and interacts with the child in its development. The risk that a child would develop overweight was amongst other things depending on the child's eating- and exercising habits.This habit was formatted for example by the circumstances in the family, availability of sweets/food and the choice of leisure time activities.The consequences for the overweight/obese children could be that the child did not manage to keep up with its friend's physical activities which led to a sense of rejection, risk of being bullied by friends, the risk of a damaged physical and psychic health. The problem was not easy to measure and all of the studies demonstrated that parental involvement is necessary in an effective treatment of childhood obesity..

The child perspective is a complex area primarily because of its many ways of interpretation but also because children are considered to be less competent than adults. Our hypothesis was that adults in court-proceedings make decisions in the child?s place. The aim of this study was to investigate the judicial meaning of the child perspective in ?Socialtjänstlagen? (SoL) and ?lag om särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga? (LVU).

In Sweden the social assistance from a historical perspective, has been a part of the social legislation, since the 18th century. In that time called poor relief. Through the centuries this has established the social assistance we have today. With focus on the child, we have attempted to illustrate how the social workers consider the child perspective when they are dealing with the social assistance. We wanted to get a view of how the social worker reasons about needs the children have and how they can see that the benefit has been provided for.

The main purpose of this essay was to study how the child's own view appeared in the office of family law investigations and in the following municipal court verdicts and if it had influenced the judgement and the verdict. We wanted to see if the child's age was important for the possibility to make oneself heard and if there had been changes overtime related to the consideration to the child's own view in investigations- and court context.To obtain answers to the questions, we decided to execute a qualitative case study, which exclusively was based on document analyses. We selected to examine a middle-sized municipal in the southern part of Sweden. We concerned only for children in the age of 8-12 years, who was affected by a court verdict either 1999 or 2003.Our study showed, among other things, that the majority of all children were interviewed. It also showed that the age of the children didn't affect the consideration the court took to the child's opinion.

In inhalation anesthesia life-support systems are used to provide gases to the patient and to monitor important parameters. These systems are used in dynamic and stressful situations where the information-load on the operators often is significant. This thesis presents a design concept of an anesthetic system. The design goal has been to keep the information-load on the operator low with the objective to minimize confusion and error.A number of contextual inquiries were made in the operating room during surgery at four hospitals in Sweden. The goal was to understand the actual use-situations when anesthetic systems are employed.

AbstractThe aim of this qualitative study was to investigate how parents of children diagnosed with Autism, Aspergers Syndrome or ADHD/ADD describe their experience of the Swedish welfare support system in written biographies. To answer this question a study of five biographies written by parents with children diagnosed with ADHD, Autism and Asperger Syndrome where made. The conclusion was that the social network itself is of great importance to the parents. Families with single parents experienced a less positive experience of the Swedish welfare support system than parents with a spouse. The study also reveiled that families with a supporting social network and a solid financial ground in combination had the best experience of the Swedish social welfare support system.

How do you do co-operation between government agencies? It is a wide spread view that there can be quite a few hitches in co-operation between agencies. In later years this idea has spread to the media where there has been negative coverage of the social service agencies. This generally applies to cases where children suffer because the right assistance takes too long to co-ordinate or does not get co-ordinated at all between schools, healthcare and social services. The social welfare law dictates that it is the social welfare office duty to co-ordinate the government agencies for the child?s best interest.

This qualitative study is about the individual supportive conversation with the school welfare officer in upper secondary school. The main aim of the study was to find out what the pupils get out of a series of conversations with the school welfare officer and what it means for the pupils that the welfare officer belongs to the school organization. Six qualitative interviews were held with pupils who had conversation contact with the school welfare officer during their time at upper secondary school.I found that these pupils and welfare officers were oriented towards change and solutions. I found that the most important thing for the pupils was to achieve a good and trusting relationship with the welfare officer. After this the pupil starts a process of change in cooperation with the welfare officer, with the aim that the pupil should be happy and satisfied with the current life situation.