The purpose of this study was to examine how social work professionals view their professional role and how they think about the concept of social work. I also wanted to investigate what they believe characterize a professional social work. For the purposes of this study, I chose a qualitative approach in which I interviewed five people linked to the social work. The theories which I have assumed in the analysis of the results are power theory, organization theory and professional theory. The results of this study show that the respondents believe that a professional social work is performed by someone who has training and experience in the field.

The term ?social competence? is widely used by organizations in job advertisements, despite the problems of making a unified definition of it. The purpose of this study is to investigate which features the organizations require, why organizations require them and how the assessment is implemented for recruitment. To answer the purpose of this study, eight qualitative interviews conducted with recruiters from four different staffing agencies. Further a literature study was performed to define the concept of ?social competence? and its meaning, in order to later connect this to the result.

The following essay studies the change in the use of terminology pertaining to socioeconomic categorising in public political material, and how this relates to ideological changes in politics. The aim is to determine which expressions government commission reports have used after the Second World War to classify citizens in social and economic groups, and subsequently, to link the understanding of these terms to the development of Swedish welfare politics. Welfare politics in Sweden have experienced a transition in a liberal and economistic direction that is reflected in the commission reports? choices of words and phrases ? thus studying the altering terminology can increase understanding of the ideological change. My methodology is grounded in ideology critique where I examine how dominant ideology is reproduced in public political documents.

What compelled me to write this essay was the ongoing debate about DAMP/ADHD between mainly Eva Kärfve and Christopher Gillberg. The purpose of the essay was to ascertain whether there was a similar debate about Asperger Syndrome. My focus was on the causes of the syndrome, how Asperger Syndrome relates to high-functioning autism, how the causes of the syndrome are portrayed by the practitioners to those who have been diagnosed with it and their next of kin, how they view the prognosis of individuals with Asperger Syndrome and their thoughts about the method of diagnosis. To gather the material I have used semi-structured interview guides and qualitative interviews. Five interviews were carried out with six practitioners.

A foundation of our welfare state is that we have a social safety net. This safety net is designed to pick up individuals who are in need of help and support to manage their way of life. This essay regards people who need help with care or people who need help with an addiction. This essay is a qualitative text analysis, which aims to see whether, and if so how, help-seekers are constructed in 40 social service documents within a municipality in central Sweden. We have endeavored to illustrate the power that the written word possesses and which categories of people are constructed depending on the language and content of the social documents.

In Sweden approximately ten percent of all children grows up in a family where at least one parent is having an alcohol related addiction. Since 1998 the development of group activities for children in this situation has been immense. The aim of group activities is to break the child's isolation and make them feel that they are not lonely in their experiences, give them knowledge about addiction and relive the pressure of guilt and responsibility.In a comparative study we examined studied how two different group activity models one with the conception of illness and one without, use the children's network to support the group process. The aim was also to find each models definition of the "normal family", since we understood the groupactivity as a part in the normalization process. We reached our aim through interviews with group leaders and by literature studies.

The purpose with this essay was to study the judgements made by child- and adolescents psychiatry teams on a fictitious case, in order to see what similarities and differences there would be in their way of discussing, judging and proposing efforts.We carried out this study by visiting four child- and adolescents psychiatry teams and letting them make judgements on a fictitious case constructed by us. First the teams were introduced to a vignette and then asked to complete it by requiring more information till they considered themselves to have enough information to be able to arrive to a judgement on the case and propose efforts, on which we later interviewed the teams. After the interviews we compared what extra information the teams required, what judgements they made and what efforts they chose to offer the family. The result was analysed from a social constructivist perspective. One central analysis concept was diagnostic frame, which is about in what category the team places the problem.The study revealed that the judgements, which are socially constructed within the teams, differed, and that the teams offered the fictitious family different efforts.

The purpose of this study is to analyse how the local governments have implanted the new public health policy, which Sweden adopted in April 2003. The new health policy stakes out a new direction for national public health policy. Instead of focusing on diseases the new public health policy focus in factors that determine health.Important factors to study are the role of central steering from the central government. The method used is a case study of three Swedish local governments. The main material used is interviews and different policy documents within the area of public health.The conclusion of the study shows that the local governments are fairly satisfied with the steering of public health policy by the central government.

This essay deals with the same task that utilitarians have tried to solve for a long time, what is happiness? In the eighteenth-century utilitarians suggested that happiness should be the base for social political decisions. But the lack of definition disposed so that GDP became the measurement of happiness, which proved to be wrong when the unhappiness continued to increase. More than two hundred years later scientists came up with a new definition of happiness and new ways to measure it. And during the last decade economists have taken the discussion to a higher level.So once again we?re dealing with the same old issue, if happiness ought to be the base of social political decisions.

Organic animal husbandry has received a lot of criticism lately. The aim of this literature review was to examine if the rules and principles of organic pig farming give better or worse welfare in comparison to the conventional systems in Sweden. Health, physiology and behaviour have been used as indicators of welfare in this study. This is due to the importance of using more than one indicator in welfare assessments. Studies have shown that organic pigs have more remarks on joints when slaughtered, but these remarks can be reduced by vaccination against erysipelas.

This is a qualitative study, whose purpose is to examine if night shelters effects homeless peoples self-perceived psychosocial health. In Sweden alone there are almost 18000 homeless people, and 12% of them uses a night shelter. The homeless can?t be seen as a heterogeneous group but instead homelessness counts as a state of being in. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare have done mapping over the homelessness since 1993 and the problem is an important part of what the welfare system has to fight against.

Cattle production systems are changing to bigger intensified systems with larger numbers of animals per farm and more free range systems while at the same time employing fewer people. Aversive handling has been known to affect cattle production negatively for many years, but lately scientists have started to focus more on what positive effects gentle handling and positive human-cattle interactions may have on beef and dairy production. Fear can cause high stress in production animals and this can contribute to not only reduced production within beef and dairy cattle, but also increased risks for accidents and decreased animal welfare. Therefore, by reducing the fear cattle experience of humans, it could be possible to increase production, decrease accidents and increase the welfare of the animals. Reducing the animals fear and stress can be done by simple means, such as walking and talking calmly around the cattle, associating humans to positive feelings (such as feed) and stroking the cattle?s body regions associated with social grooming.

The study aims to describe and analyse the relationship between norm and practice regarding social services casework on honour-related problems. The relationship between norm and practice involves the difference between the way it is intended that social workers shall operate in these cases and how they perceive that this works in practice. We interviewed two focus groups of eight Swedish social workers, four in each group. We also held an individual interview with a social services business developer. Focus group interviews were based on two vignettes; one depicting an honour-related case and the second an "ordinary" case.

AbstractTitel: Ur elden in i askan. En kvalitativ studie om det sociala nätverkets betydelse för ensamkommande barnKeywords: unaccompanied refugee children, social network, risk and resilience, social work.Authors: Karin Bodå och Leila Silva The main purpose of this study is to illuminate and describe the importance of having a social network for unaccompanied refugee children in Sweden. Using qualitative interviews this study looks at their possibilities to create a social network in Sweden and how their network helps them to solve problems. Knowledge of this subject is important for social workers, in order to be able to encourage and help unaccompanied refugee children to build a social network. The base for our analysis is attachment theory, coping theory, social network theory, KASAM theory, risk and resilience theory, system theory are used to give deeper insight into experiences of four unaccompanied refugee boys.

The main purpose of this Master´s thesis is to examine how Swedish librari-ans manage and relate to social problems within the service to young visitors. To reach understanding in this subject, qualitative interviews with six Swedish public librarians have been conducted. As a theoretical framework the ideas of interactions and identity have been used. These concepts together with attitude and behavior, form the theoreti-cal model upon which the analysis of the material is based. The outcome of the study shows that social problems exists and affect the library staff?s daily work.