How does a social welfare officer know when a parent with mental illness or behavioral symptoms is harmful to the children? As a social you are confronted with different ethical dilemmas on a daily basis. The social welfare officers have to follow their own authorities, laws, guidelines and regulations while at the same time do everything to satisfy their clients? needs. This inconsistency can sometimes be difficult to handle.

Animal welfare is of increasing concern in present society. In commercial pig farming, animal welfare problems are common. One of the causes for these problems is the barren environment in which pigs are housed, which can cause oral manipulation of pen mates. Providing straw might be one solution to this problem. Another solution could be reached through genetic selection.

This is a qualitative interview study about intellectually disabled parents and their children. I have conducted interviews with six professional staff who have some experience working with intellectually disabled persons. In my investigation I used vignettes and those I interviewed had to read the same story about Anders and Britta in preparation for the interview. The six persons whom I interviewed were: a midwife at a mother care centre, a nurse at a child health centre, a social welfare officer at a rehabilitation centre, a "LSS administrator" at a local authority, and two social welfare secretaries. One of the two welfare secretaries works to assess the social situation of children and the other one works with fostercare.The conclusion that I have drawn is that the relationship between intellectually disabled parents and their children is very important.

The purpose of this paper was to study the various organisations that work with drug abusing homeless people in Lund. We have tried to compare the possibilities they have to change the way the homeless people look at themselves. The organisations that we have studied are Aluma, Diakonicentralen, the shelter Piletorp and the social welfare office.The methods used to collect data were interviews with professionals and homeless people as well as reading literature. We have used Ted Goldberg's (docent in social work at the university in Stockholm) theory. He writes that you have to be a significant other to persons with deviant behaviour to be able to help them become a part of the society and to change the way they look at themselves.

The purpose of our study is to examine whether social welfare secretaries experience obstacles in work to do their tasks in a way that they, from their own values, thinks is right. And if so, what are the reactions and what strategies do they use to manage this. The study is based on a qualitative method. The data consist of interviews, with five social welfare secretaries, which all work in southern Sweden. The social welfare secretaries both work at a children- and youth department and at a social allowance department.

The focus of this thesis is on social workers? knowledge in assessing and making decisions in child welfare cases. The primary aim is to identify what skills or knowledge social workers find most useful within child welfare agencies in Swedish municipalities. Six different types of knowledge, social policy and the approach of child welfare cases are perspectives considered in the analysis. The interviews with social workers were held in three agencies in southern Sweden, in 2014.

The purpose of this essay has been to study the different discourses that are expressed in social welfare secretaries? assertions when they assess cases with elements of honour-related violence, intimidation and oppression. To do so I have used a discourse analysis theory and technique, based on three qualitative interviews with social welfare secretaries. The interviews were focused on vignettes, which were all fictitious cases with various elements of honour-related violence. One of the interviews was a focus groupinterview with four participants, while the other two interviews were individual.

AbstractSocial welfare workers employed in the same county base their assessments on the same laws, routines and guidelines, yet it seems that they sometimes come to different decisions. It's the discretion that enables the social workers to make individualized decisions adapted to each clients unique situation.The purpose of this paper is to examine social welfare workers reflections on discretion and what influences their discretion in the professional role.Six qualitative interviews were conducted with social welfare workers in three communitys i the middle of Sweden.The main result shows that it is primarily four factors that affect the social welfare workers discretion in the professional role :External factors such as other organizations change of regulations and cooperation with other organizations.Organizational factors such as routines, rules and guidelines .Professional factors such as the opportunity to use experience and professionalknowledge to determine which measure works in different situations.Individual factors like the workers ability for initiative and the clients individualcircumstances. Social welfare workers feel that they have a relatively wide discretion in their profession. They believe they have the ability to make individual evaluations of each client, however they also believe that their discretion often is limited by lack of time.Key words: social welfare workers, clients, discretion, assessments. .

The purpose of this essay was to see how the construction of elderly immigrants as a problem in healthcare and elderly care has been described in the relevant literature. In the course of doing so I tried to answer the following questions; What is said to be the expected problems or difficulties in work with eldely immigrants? How are the expected members of the problemgroup defined and identified? Whos perspective dominates the description of the problem, the users or the investigators? These questions were hard to answer and I had to conclude that the problem was not clearly defined; there was only an assumption of a problem. This, however, has not been a hindrance in the category of elderly immigrants being claimed to be a group with problems that need research and further investigation. The dominating perspective is that of the investigators as they are the ones who define and identify who is a part of the problemgroup..

The North-American sociologist Michael Lipsky has characterized social workers as street-level bureaucrats with a substantial discretion in the relationship between the welfare state and its citizens. Within Lipsky´s theoretical framework social workers appear as a powerful group that socializes the citizens to uphold certain expectations towards the welfare state and its (re)distributional programs. From this point of view, it is important to learn more about social workers and the attitudes they express towards the welfare state. The aim of this study is to analyze how the welfare-political attitudes of future social workers are affected by their social background (e.g. class background and ancestral homeland).

AbstractWorking with child and youth welfare is one of the most difficult challenges a social worker might face in the field of social work. Those who work with child and youth welfare are more exposed to stress and burnout than other comparable human service occupations. Research links the prevalence of stress and burnout to several key variables, such as demographics, working conditions and personality factors. In contrast, even though social workers in this field face many negative work-related problems they report a high job satisfaction. The aim of this study is to examine how uplifting and straining experiences affect social workers, who work with child and youth welfare, through the use of The Critical Incident Technique and interviews.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the satellite states of the former Communist bloc immediately departed on a journey towards democracy and market capitalism. Among the many tasks of the newly elected governments, one was to transform the paternalist Communist welfare state into a social system that would decrease the oversized role of the state, at the same time as protecting the citizens from the hardships ensued from the transition.I have studied the evolution of new welfare systems in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, three countries generally agreed as the most similar and most successfull transition countries of the Eastern bloc. Gøsta Esping-Andersen's prominent typology of welfare regimes, consisting of the liberal, corporatist and social democratic regime-types, has constituted the theoretical basis of the analysis. Simultaneously, applying new cases to the typology implies an element of theory testing.The study shows that 40 years of Communism and partial isolation from the West has not prevented these three countries from developing welfare states fully compatible with those of Western Europe and the Anglo-Saxon nations and that all three of them in fact fall within the scope of the corporatist regime-type..

In the last couple of years changes in the legal systems treatment of young offenders has given the social worker more legal responsibility. In view of this, our purpose with this study was to examine how social workers and prosecutors apprehend the role of the social worker during the legal process. The study was delimited to look into the handling of young offenders between the ages of 15 and 18 years old. The questions we intended to look at were: How do the social workers reason when trying to see the need of a child within a legal context; Do prosecutors and social workers experience that they have different approaches when looking at young offenders, as a consequence of their different professions; What is the opinion among social workers considering the duty of the social services to administrate community service for young offenders; How do the social workers argue when determining whether or not a young offender has a "special need for care". These questions were answered through empirical studies where six social workers and two prosecutors were interviewed.

The increasing significance of social economy as a concept is linked to general global processes such as the crisis of the welfare state, neoliberal globalization, anti-bureaucracy tendencies and decentralization, but also to a growing political interest in human rights and social development. In Sweden the idea of the social economy generates wide support within civil society as well as within the government and across party political boundaries. Furthermore, what is problematic in this context is the fact that the discussions on the subject tend to be relatively uncritical and often it seems as if though the expansion itself is the main objective. The emphasis on cooperation and the third sector in terms of welfare production implies a set of risks in relation to state responsibility, democracy and the autonomy of civil society. This paper aims to explore those risks and how they can be dealt with within the Swedish context..

This bachelor essay studies families that have migrated from countries in Europe to Sweden,and their experiences of adapting to new conditions of the Swedish welfare state. Theirexperiences are studied firstly from an institutional point of view, which refers to the family?s experience of adapting family life to Swedish family social policy. Secondly it focuses how the families experience new norms and values connected to Swedish family social policy. The main aim is to seek what problems families migrating to Sweden might be confronted with when adapting to new conditions of the welfare state.