Summary:Teenage girls? choice of dropping out or complete a treatment.The purpose of this study is to investigate, from a client?s perspective, why teenage girls (age 13 to 17) drop-out or complete a treatment at Familjehuset in Karlstad, Sweden. We also want to investigate if the teenage girls? experiences coordinate with the social workers opinion of why the teenage girls choose to drop-out or complete the treatment. Earlier research shows that many factors influence the client?s choice.

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 aim of this study has been to highlight how school social workers experience their discretion, and furthermore how they feel about working in a context mainly dedicated to teachers. The study is executed with a qualitative research method where ten interviews with school social workers, in eight schools in the area of Stockholm have been conducted. The theoretical framework used to analyze the results was discretion, street-level bureaucracy and human service organizations.The main findings of this study imply that the most important ambition of the social work that was conducted in the schools was to help the students reach their knowledge goals. The assignment is, however, not clearly defined, which has lead to school social workers defining the mission and goals themselves. They all have wide discretion and great possibilities to decide how to execute their work, but how they use the freedom that was given seems to vary among them.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between physical activity and perceived stress, energy and musculoskeletal disorders among office-workers and warehouse-workers and also to see if there were any differences depending on work-place and gender. The method that was used to collect data was three different validated questionnaires that measured stress and energy (the Stress-Energy questionnaire), musculoskeletal disorders (intensity and localization of pain, a Pain Drawing questionnaire with a VAS-scale) and physical activity (IPAQ ? the short version). Eighty-eight workers participated in the study. Forty-seven of them were office-workers and forty-one were warehouse-workers.

The primary purpose of this essay is to study and describe what student?s self experiences of the media coverage of social work. The theoretical perspectives applied to analyse the empirical data are social constructionism, roles, and construction. The method of this study is qualitative and based on ten personal interviews. The material has been analysed by condensed meaning units and three themes have been used, the media coverage of social work, the relationship between social workers and media and the influence media coverage has on the students.The results given from these interviews show that the majority of the interviewed group considers the media coverage of social work as negative.

Different studies have shown that somewhere between 10 000 and 75 000 persons live in Sweden as undocumented migrants. They are not entitled to basic human and social rights such as access to health care on the same basis as persons holding a residence permit in Sweden. Undocumented migrants are often exploited as workers in the informal economy and they are not allowed to organize in unions. The Swedish Social Services is by law bound to care for all people living in Sweden, though in reality undocumented migrants are excluded from benefits and efforts granted by the Social Services. Our aim with the study has been to investigate the situation of undocumented migrants in Sweden and in relation to Social Services.

Leadership is about synchronizing people into doing actions together to reach a common goal. To be able to do such thing you have to be a good leader. A mutual feature between good leaders is a good self awareness in order to be able to lead others. By letting others evaluate the features of a leader it can give a good self image of the leaders? leadership.

The main purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse how social worker on a specific Social Service Agency describe their experiences. My focus has been to concentrate on social worker, whose task is related to young people. The paper is presented from three different themes; work assignments, professional roles and projects in life. The central questions are; Which are the socialworker´s main tasks? How does the social worker see himself in his professional role? Have their expectations been fulfilled? Where do they get their motivation from? Which are the reasons why the job as social worker is so strenuous? I have interviewed four social workers (semi-structured interviews), and a qualitative method is used.

This study is mostly based on previous research, which includes Sub-national actor?s attitudes and regional action towards the European Union. The purpose of the study is to investigate if four Swedish municipalities in Värmland operate internationally towards the European Union and deepen an understanding of their actions. The main research question is: - How can we increase our understanding of municipal action against the European Union? The research questions of this study are answered through qualitative method and semi-structured interviews were conducted.

The purpose of this study is to find out how social workers in one medium and one smallmunicipality in central Sweden perceive the need of financial support for young adults formore than one year and what the causes might be. To answer our research questions aqualitative research method was used and four social workers were interviewed. The resulthas been analyzed based of social exclusion, stigma, as well as on structural and individuallevel and linked to previous research. Our results show that although young adults are anexception for long duration for financial support, there are those who lack other means ofsupport for a long time. The results also show that young adults often are recurring in thesocial services, and they are long-lasting.

This study is inspired by research about alliance as a common factor. The purpose is to explore the positive experiences among community-based social support workers when breaking the rules with their clients. The study questions in which situations they broke the rules and how they handled these situations related to their clients and colleges. Qualitative, individual interviews were made with four community-based social support workers who had such experiences. The results were analysed through an hermeneutic approach using Johan Asplund's theory of social responsiveness.

Since drinking habits are created in social environments the workplace has an important role in alcohol prevention. This study has investigated employees (N=216) in a Swedish municipality work organisation with the purpose to describe the alcohol culture in workplace and how it influences on the workers attitudes towards alcohol. The theoretical baseline for the study has been Ames and Janes framework that explains the relation between workplace culture and drinking habits among workers. The study showed significant relations between restrictive attitude towards alcohol and not drinking with co-workers (POR: 2.5) and feeling low pressure in the work situation (POR: 2.2). Therefore it should be of interest for employers to adopt a cultural perspective and a primary prevention strategy in their alcohol policies that focuses on social relations and the workplace conditions.

AbstractWith the murder of Fadime in 2002 honor killings and honour related oppression became a subject of wide public debate. The question was raised whether the Swedish social services had the knowledge and the resources necessary to face the issue with honor related oppression.This study is about the views on honor related oppression among oppressed women and professional social workers and aims to explore the relationship between social worker and client in an honor related context. Does the risk of culture clashes pose a problem in dealing with the Swedish authorities and do Swedish social workers have the necessary tools to help the, often young, oppressed women that seek their aid? This is a qualitative study based on five individual interviews: Two former victims of honour related oppression, two professional social workers and one relative of a young girl who was the victim of an honor killing.Observations:The social workers found that they had adequate resources at hand but that awareness among employees in the social services needed to be improved.The clients felt that the help they?ve received from the social services was helpful but that more information to the public about available resources was necessary along with a better understanding of the differences between their own culture and that of the Swedish society. The clients expressed that the realization that they were being oppressed didn?t come overnight.

This bachelor thesis aims to investigate how social workers in Uppsala describe their procedure when investigating applications for housing assistance (i.e. boendestöd). Boendestöd is a specific type of services for people with disabilities, which aim to assist them in their lives. This welfare service is one of many regulated by the framework legislation that is the social services act (SoL 2001:453). Previous research indicates that civil servants who make decisions based on goal-oriented framework legislations like SoL, have a great freedom to act when they make judgments and decisions.

The purpose of this study is to understand encounter by individual depictions of meetingsperceived by social workers and clients in social services. Thus, we want to understand moreabout how clients and social workers as actors encounter each other in meetings in the socialservices. The study also aims to understand how the two actors affect each other in this typeof interaction and whether there are other influencing factors. We conducted a qualitativestudy by interviewing informants with semi-structured interview questions. The informantswere comprised of three social workers and eight clients.