The aim of this Masters thesis is to investigate how trained social workers experience information in their daily work. The thesis focussed on three major questions: - What type of information and information sources are mostly used by the trained social workers? - What kind of information barriers are described by the participants? - How can the patterns of information seeking and information use be understood on the basis of the trained social workers professional and social context? Semi-structured interviews were carried out with trained social workers working with child welfare enquiries. My theoretical framework consists of user and context oriented theories about classifications of information, information barriers and models of information sources. My conclusions are that trained social workers working with risk assessment in child protection services, need to use different kinds of information in their daily work, such as problem information, domain information and problem-solving information.

The aim of this study is to investigate and analyze the potential effects on a number of social workers that may arise from listening to stories of domestic violence, and how these social workers deal with the potential effects. The study is based on qualitative interviews with seven social workers that work with domestic violence. The theoretical perspective that we used was the theory of coping. The results of this study have indicated that the respondents have been affected of listening to the stories of domestic violence. Examples of different impacts that the work has had on some of the social workers is that they avoid movies and/or books with elements of violence, they are more aware of the domestic violence in the surroundings and there has also been changes in their cognitive schemas.

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 article is to examine how social workers may experience fear in their profession, how they and their organizations handle the fear and how the fear may affect their practice. To obtain the purpose, in-depth interviews were carried out with seven social workers from the southeastern part of Sweden. The experiences of fear were many and are summarized in four categories. Fear of treats and violence, fear of the responsibility in complicated situations and without optimal solution, fear of being regarded and judged as worthless and fear of being scrutinized with the risk of being stigmatized. Five strategies were identified to handle the fear: Safety strategies (e.g.

This essay describes social workers view on the action contact person. The study was qualitative and six social workers were interviewed on the topic. The effort contact person were chosen as the object for this study since it is the most common action given to young people, despite the lack of research about this subject. The result was analyzed out of conduct action theory and the theory of street level bureaucrats as well as scientific research in this area. The result of this study shows that most of the social workers consider the action as positive.

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.

This study is about conception in the evaluation of financial assistance within the social services. The aim of this study is to describe and understand how social workers reason about variation, conception and local norms and its significance in the evaluation process. To reach this purpose we have conducted semi-structured interviews with eight social workers in which different themes were discussed and reasoned about. In order to understand and analyze our results we have studied/used the knowledge about tacit knowledge and street-level bureaucracy. Our results showed, as previous research states, that social workers do have conceptions about clients.

In Sweden the social assistance from a historical perspective, has been a part of the social legislation, since the 18th century. In that time called poor relief. Through the centuries this has established the social assistance we have today. With focus on the child, we have attempted to illustrate how the social workers consider the child perspective when they are dealing with the social assistance. We wanted to get a view of how the social worker reasons about needs the children have and how they can see that the benefit has been provided for.

The opinion of social workers towards their work with children and young persons wasstudied in this essay. Even their point of view with reference to the term the child?s bestinterest has being considered and special focus was laid on the social workers attitudestowards media coverage and its criticism towards their work. A qualitative approach was usedconsisted of six interviews. The theoretical frameworks were based on the theory aboutfreedom of action and the theory of social representations.

The aim of this study is to illustrate, and analyze how social workers are able to more effectively pursue operative possibilities within their own particular organizations. The main question concerning this issue is: How are social workers, working within the same district organization able to realise any potential for co-operation with other social workers, in different locales and units, yet working within the same organization? Following on from this question, further issues arise such as: 1. How do the varying demands of the clients affect the workload of the social worker? 2.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how social services workers describe, the risk of being exposed to threats and violence in their profession. Six social services workers were interviewed, four from the Welfare Office in a major city and two from the Child and Family Services in a minor city. Results showed that the majority of social services workers consider themselves exposed in their profession, meaning that they feel there's a risk of a violent or threatening situation occurring in their work situation. All interviewees had experiences from some sort of threat or violence in a work related context and they attested that non-personal assaults, such as threats made through telephone, email and answering machines are more common than verbal assaults made in personal meetings. Being prepared and listening to ones intuition is a way of dealing with exposure when meeting with a client.

Children's Need In Focus (BBIC) is a processing and documentation system used in child welfare cases to investigate, plan and monitor interventions. The BBIC has had a breakthrough in Sweden and out of the country's 290 municipalities, there are 284 that use the system daily as a tool in cases involving children. The purpose of this study was to examine how social workers experience the BBIC as a working system and what strengths and weaknesses there are in the BBIC concept. We wanted our study to examine how the BBIC could possibly enhance the quality of childcare matters, but also how the BBIC could potentially increase children's participation in cases. We have performed qualitative interviews with eight social workers who work in four different municipalities where the BBIC is applied daily.

We chose to study the groups for divorced children in Vellinge municipal because there was no evaluation made of these kinds of groups with the involved methods.Vellinge municipal has had groups for children to divorced parents since 2000. During this period of time the total numbers of children in these groups have expanded. As of now, there are two groups.Our goal with this study was to see which way the CAP, Children Are People, manual has been implemented in the every-day work in the group. Several studies have been made about CAP but not in the context of groups for divorced children. We have also examined results in other municipals that have implemented groups for divorced children into their social services.We have interviewed ten children and four social workers.

The aim of this study was to examine the perceptions within social services regarding men who are victims of domestic violence based on how gender, sexuality, masculinity and victimhood was constructed in the social workers' statements. Eight qualitative interviews were conducted with nine social workers who work within the social services and meet people who are victims of domestic violence. A social constructionist scientific approach has permeated the study and theories of gender, heteronormativity, masculinity and the ideal victim has served as the study?s theoretical views. The results of the study showed that some of the social workers ascribed men specific characteristics such as strength and fearlessness.

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.