Society is characterized by patterns of behavior and interaction that is created and recreated inthe interplay between individuality/collectivity and freedom/constraint, thus represents avariety of social issues and social phenomena. One of these phenomena is social supportexchanges and social capital. In order to obtain views on how this might appear in a specificsociety and contribute to the knowledge about social support exchanges and social capital, thisstudy was done with seven families in a village in Nepal. The village and the families gave aview and an example of how it might look in a place where social support exchanges plays acrucial role in this way of living. Through observations and interviews I have tried to make thesocial support exchange areas and meanings visibile.

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 aim of this essay was to examine what kind of help and support social services departement can offer gamblers and their relatives. We also want to examine what the relatives to the gamblers think about the help and support they have got from the social services departement. Central questions we asked were: What kind of help and support can social services department offer the gamblers and there relatives? What kind of help is there to get for children respectively adult relatives? Do the relatives consider that the social worker have enough knowledge about the problem? Do the social workers consider that they have enough knowledge about the problem? This is a qualitative study of three women relatives to the gamblers, three social workers and one specialist in this problem. We have delimited the study to one big city in Sweden.

The issue of honour related problems in schools are important Social problems in Sweden. It?s not unusual that honour related problem has had serious consequences before any action has been inserted by society. Sometimes the efforts made by society have had no impact whatsoever due to them being inserted too late. We can conclude based on our literature and our interviews, the importance of prevention.

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 objective of this thesis was to study how parents of adult drug addicts experience their contact with the social welfare office, what elements affected the parents degree of satisfaction with the contact with the social welfare office, and whether the contact meant any help for them. Six parents of adult drug addicts were interviewed..

For over 40 years, there's been a debate in Sweden of whether it's good or bad with maintenance therapy for heroin addicts. This method is far more acknowledged in other parts of Europe and in USA. The aim of this paper was to explore how public actors manifest their thoughts concerning the subject of the substitution program in Sweden. This approach includes the complex of problems that can be found in statements and the discourses that these operators stand for and support. In my analysis the philosophical thread was principally based on Michael Foucault ideas, but also on other theories related to social constructionism.

The aim of this essay was to look into and compare the experiences and opinions about the practice of 13 § LVM among persons that, through their profession, use the law.The questions we have been asking were; what experiences and opinions the individuals have about the paragraph in general, what they think about the cases when no application for LVM is made after a client has been taken in charge as directed by 13 § LVM, and of the fact that the majority of cases of LVM are initiated by the same paragraph. Another question was how the individuals think about the legal security in connection to 13 § LVM.The methods used are qualitative and we have interviewed individuals from different fields of social work that comes in contact with drug abusers.The findings from these studies include that care made out of the clients' free will is the main reason why an application is not made. It is also the reason to why many LVM initiates as directed by 13 § LVM for the reason that the districts above all try to help the clients without force. The economical aspects are repeatedly mentioned as another reason to the problems appeared in connection with 13 § LVM..

The purpose of this study was to examine and illustrate whether employed social workers, working with supplementary benefits at a social service office, felt stressed. If so was the case, we wanted to investigate if this stress that they felt had any effect on their clients. This study was based on eight qualitative interviews, of which four was with social workers and four was with clients. For a better understanding of our results we used Karasek & Theorells demand-control-support model.The study reveals that the social workers do feel stressed, but they only do so in periods. They declare that they would like to have more time for their work assignments, the meetings with the clients in particulate.

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.

The purpose of this study was to examine the problematic and frustrating aspects of parenthood in the modern runaway world of today. In other words, we wanted to study how parents in Sweden experienced their life as parents in the beginning of the 21th century.We wanted to find answers to the following questions:What kind of problems do parents experience and how do they deal with these problems?What would parents consider to be typical for them as parents compared to how they remember their own parents?What do parents think about family politics?Do parents think they need parent education?If parents want parent education, why do they want it?To answer these questions we used qualitative interviews. With this method we got information from six parents and five professional parent educators who was kind enough to let us interview them. We also gathered information about the subject through literature and news articles.The result of the study can be divided into three parts.

This essay aims to examine and compare Swedish and Norwegian social work with children. It is a comparative study between two social welfare offices, in districts with similar population and problems, one located in Stockholm and one in Oslo. The main questions were; how is the work organized and carried out, what type of help and assistance is available and what kind of discretion and powers do the social workers have. In our essay we used qualitative methods mostly based on interviews, vignette questionnaires and documents, but also written research. In our analysis we used modern organisation theory and street level bureaucracy to seek explanations.The two welfare offices have similarities and differences.

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.