The purpose of our study was to investigate whether national adoptions could be an option within the childcare system in Sweden. We wanted to create an understanding of how the professionals agree to this. We have implemented a comprehensive literature review as well as a qualitative study, taking benefit of a phenomenological method of analysis. The result of our study shows that national adoptions cannot replace foster placements but be a good addition to Foster homes. Adoption gives the children a more secure and stable life..

This qualitative study is about motivation and experience of support among non-kinship fosterparents in a child welfare agency (NGO), in Paraguay. The empirical data where collectedthrough out six semi-structured qualitative interviews, with totally eight foster parentsparticipating. The aim of the study was to describe and analyze what motivates foster parentsand how they experience support from their formal and informal network. Further theobjective was to investigate how support (may) affect motivation and enable good foster care.Theoretical concepts such as solidarity, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as socialsupport where used to analyze the data.The results show that there are many different motives and motivations (intrinsic andextrinsic) that correlate in the decision to become and continue to be a foster parent. Amongthem social involvement, the wish to make a difference in a child?s life, have something tooffer as a family and personal satisfaction seems to be the most frequent reasons.

The proportion of elderly people in Sweden is increasing. Many of these live at home and as their age increases so does the likelihood of health problems and the need for support, medical attention and care. Personnel working with home help provide a large part of this care, including areas of home-based care that are the responsibility of the district nurse. The purpose of this paper is to describe how home-help personnel perceive their work in the area of home-based care, as their views are an important factor in the ability to provide a care system that funktions successfully. The method employed here is phenomenografic and nine subjects from a home-help group have been interviewed.

The purpose of this essay was to examine and compare what attitudes Swedish and Belgian social workers may have towards residential care and foster care for children and young people. To answer the purpose eight qualitative interviews with four Swedish and four Belgian social workers were made. The results were analyzed by theory of organization and professional acting space. The results of the study show that the social workers in both countries preferred foster care, especially for small children, and that the Swedish social workers had a more negative attitude towards residential care than the Belgian social workers. Even though the Belgian social workers preferred foster care, they found themselves forced to choose residential care due to lack of available foster care facilities, something that did not seem to affect the Swedish social workers.

Placing children in foster care is today considered the best alternative for children unable to stay in their biological environment. A nuclear family consisting of a father, a mother and a child is the most common family structure within foster care today. The purpose of this thesis is to gain insight on the family norms that control the foster care system. It's a qualitative study based on interviews with six professional social workers within the field of foster care. This method gave us empirical material, that was later analyzed from two main theories and one theoretical concept.

The educational underachievement of children in foster care has been known for a long time. This study aimed to compile and analyze the current knowledge about interventions, intended to improve foster children?s school achievements. The method used was a systematically undertaken narrative review. Despite a comprehensive searching strategy, only ten relevant studies were found, indicating that little has been done to improve the educational outcomes for children in public care.

AbstractThe intention of our study was to examine the meaning of home of elderly women and men and how they experience their getting older. We also wanted to see how elderly women and men experience to receive home-help-service in their own home. The study was based on qualitative interviews with elderly women and men. The informants were five women and four men between the ages of 60-84 years. They all had everyday help from the home-help-service.

The aim with this thesis is to study how the phenomenon young people who run away from home (runaways) is presented in the research literature. The question at issue in our thesis is: How does research literature present the phenomenon of young people who run away from home? We have selected seven primary documents that we consider gives a broad picture of the knowledge about runaways. We have a postmodern and a hermeneutic approach in our thesis. Our material has been analyzed on the basis of social constructionist theory and the new sociological paradigm of childhood.

The aim of the study was to understand how the family home secretary reasons and thinks and how they express themselves in their actions towards the family home?s biological children. The method used is qualitative semi-structured interviews, involving six family home secretaries from four different municipalities. The results were analyzed with the help of two theories ? the theory of grassroots bureaucracy and the sociology of childhood theory.

The aim of the study was to understand how the family home secretary reasons and thinks and how they express themselves in their actions towards the family home?s biological children. The method used is qualitative semi-structured interviews, involving six family home secretaries from four different municipalities. The results were analyzed with the help of two theories ? the theory of grassroots bureaucracy and the sociology of childhood theory.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the social services are applying the sections of the law concerning custody transfer within foster care. More specifically the aim was to find out what circumstances are underlying the social services decision to go through with a custody transfer within the foster care, and to find out which difficulties and possibilities the law offers when it comes to this process. The study was based on interviews with six respondents, within the social services, who have great experiences working with these issues. The study concluded that there are several factors which affects the decision whether to implement at custody transfer or not, and some of these are the child?s attachment, the child?s fundamental needs and consent from the involving parties in the case.

A large number of children and teenagers are placed in foster care for various reasons. Social services have a responsibility to follow up youths and ensure that they have the same opportunity for positive development as other young people. A qualitative study was conducted with an abductive perspective by gathering material from social workers in this particular field. The research design of this study is an interview study. The theoretical premise was Bronfenbrenners ecosystem theory and Maslows hierarchy of needs theory.

Children are said to be the future of our society. Hence, how we take care of our children is a cause of concern. This is evident in much of the social work that is carried out in Sweden. One of the times when we find children to be the most vulnerable is when they, for different reasons, are separated from their biological families and placed in foster care. Based on the fact that Sweden over the last century has experienced an increased immigration intake we wanted to take a closer look on how this change of the population dynamics has influenced foster care in the country.

The purpose of our research was to explore the social situation of unaccompanied children. We also aimed to reveal the relation between their social situation and their identity development. The overall purpose were to describe their social situation, the value of significant others, how different languages influence their identity development and finally how their origin affects their future dreams.In order to achieve the best result in our research a qualitative method was used. This was based on qualitative interviews and was disposed around a very loose set of questions in order to let the interviewees lead the way. The analysis of the result was conducted on the basis of a set of theories and concepts in order to understand the identity development.

The aim of this paper is to look into the occurrence of home schooling by choice in Sweden. It examines the subject of home education in order to provide an informative overview. It also looks into the legal aspects of the matter to see whether freedom of choice is an issue here when it comes to choosing a certain type of teaching for children of compulsory school age. A further purpose is to provide a comparison of home education in Sweden and in other countries such as the United States, England and Norway.In order to do this we have carried out a secondary analysis of previous research and have also interviewed teachers as well as people with experience of home educating their own children. To accomplish this, we had to look to England for literature and home educating families as home education is a much more common practise in England.The result of this paper strongly indicates that home schooling is not only a legally viable option to traditional schooling, both in Sweden and the other countries concerned, but that it is also a trend that is expected to increase.