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.

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.

The aim of this paper was to examine how social workers' comprehension of the need of financial aid exists in, and is influated by, the organisation they work in. To investigate this, we asked ourself questions concerning how the social worker view the way that the finicial aid-system and work surrounding it is formed, whether the social worker's understanding of the need of financial aid co-exists with the percieved common understanding of the work place (do the understandings coincide, do the social worker adjust his or her understanding or is it possible to have a separate understanding), whether the social worker feel that he or she have discretion to influence the organisation and how possible conflicts between different views are handled. We felt that a qualitative method would best help us answer these questions. We therefore interviewed seven social workers working in the same organisation. We then looked at our material from an organisational theory perspective, focusing on the individual in the organisation.We found that the social workers were socialised into the organisation and adapted the norms and values that existed there.

On-call work has increased substantially in the past 20 years in Sweden, not least in the public sector and most notably in health and social care. This thesis argues that the increase has considerable influence on the prospects of on-call workers in the public services to act as guardians of democracy. Based on theories of Lennart Lundquist, the results of this study show that on-call workers suffers from inferior opportunities to act as democratic guardians in particularly two matters. First; they have fewer prospects than standard employees of professionalism due to lack of education and capacitation. Second; on-call workers have inferior opportunities to protest against wrongs, due to no real formalized possibilities to inform and due to transactional psychological contracts.

The Working Hours Act regulates the working time conditions and together with the Working Time Directive of EU both acts aim to protect the workers. However, with The Swedish Model it is possible to diverge from the law-regulations by collective agreement by the parts of the Swedish labor market. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the national and international law regulations and further on study a few selected Swedish central collective agreements to discover in which extension deviation from the law occur. The sections of the Working Hours Act?s that has been investigated is ordinary working time, daily rest, weekly rest periods, breaks and maximum weekly working time.

With this research we aimed to seek how youth workers express their experience of counselling on the internet compared to traditional counselling face to face with a theoretical ground in semiotics and symbolic interactionism. Our questions were 1) How do youth workers describe their experiences from anonymous, faceless online counselling? 2) How do youth workers experience the differences between online counselling and the traditional face-to-face counselling? 3) Which possibilities and difficulties do they see in online communication with adolescents? We used semi-structed interviews with seven youth workers. Six of those are active in non-profit organisations, and one in social services. The results from our interviews showed that the interviewees saw that misunderstandings were more frequent on the internet, but that online counselling with adolescents still was easier than in the face-to-face meetings.

The purpose of our study is to examine whether stress among social workers is present, and ifso, what strategies they and their supervisors use to manage work-related stress. The study isbased on a qualitative method. The data consist of interviews, with six social workers andthree supervisors. The study?s theoretical framework is based on KASAM, SOC-sense ofcoherence by Antonovsky, demand- control- support model by Karasek & Theorell, stresstheory by Hans Selye and coping strategies by Lazarus.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how social workers who worked with financial assistance perceived their work situation and the impact work-related stress had on their health and quality of work. Further, the study intended to find out if they felt that they received support from their employer that could prevent stress-related sick leave. The following two research questions were to be answered: In what way does work-related stress affect social workers? health and job quality according to their own experience? What kind of support and help experienced social workers were available within their organization? To receive answers to the questions semi-structured interviews with five social workers were conducted, analyzed and interpreted. The results showed that when social workers have a heavy case burden, high stress and a risk of deteriorated job quality occurred.

Author: Martina Holgersson och Pranvera VishajSupervisor: Matts MosessonTitle: ?A study about how Social Services understand and put child perspective into practice?The purpose of this study is to describe and understand how the child perspective is perceived and put into practice by the Social Services. Our questions were: ?How is the child perspective perceived by the Social Services?? and ?In what way is the child perspective put into practice in the Social Services? work?? Our approach to knowledge is based on the hermeneutic tradition of knowledge. The essay rests upon semi-structured interviews with ten Social Services? workers.

The purpose of this thesis is to achieve a greater understanding of how the social workers at the family unit in one of Stockholm municipalities comprehend the work environment at the workplace. Our aim is also to find out how the work environment can affect the health of the social workers in the form of their wellbeing and comfort at the workplace. In order to answer our purpose we conducted interviews of all social workers at the family unit in one of Stockholm municipalities that describe how they experience the work-environment in the workplace and how it influences their health.  We have analyzed the interview material in a thematic analysis based on three theoretical perspectives; SOC, claim ? control - support and Human relations. We have also coupled the interview material to the background chapter in this thesis that describes how a good working environment should be structured.  The chosen method characterizes an abductive process.

To investigate adoptions are part of the social worker's duties. The aim of our study was to examine some adoptive parents, to internationally adopted children, experience of adopting, the time before the adoption, the adoption process, and the time after the adoption. The study is based on qualitative interviews with seven adoptive parents. Theoretical frameworks that have been used are a phenomenological perspective, the dramaturgical perspective of Goffman and the theory of rites of passage.The result of our study shows that the adoptive parents have tried ?everything? to be-come parents in a biological way before they came to the decision to adopt.

The purpose of our study is to examine whether stress among social workers is present, and ifso, what strategies they and their supervisors use to manage work-related stress. The study isbased on a qualitative method. The data consist of interviews, with six social workers andthree supervisors. The study?s theoretical framework is based on KASAM, SOC-sense ofcoherence by Antonovsky, demand- control- support model by Karasek & Theorell, stresstheory by Hans Selye and coping strategies by Lazarus.

Family centres are established to serve families with children and the personnel usually consists of units of social-workers, preschool staff, paediatric nurses and midwives. The purpose of the study was to examine the social-workers preventive work with families at the family centre. To fulfil the purpose, a qualitative interview with five social-workers was conducted. The theoretical framework referred to attachment and empowerment theory. The results of the study showed that the main part of the work consists of giving advice and support to parents.

In the beginning of 2002 a new kind of debate started inside the Swedish trade unions that also were published in the newspapers. The debate was about if the Swedish trade unionshould organize the undocumented workforce or not. In this thesis I will deal with this issue and also investigate what kind of solutions the trade unions in Sweden use on this newphenomenon, a phenomenon that recently have become a social and political problem during the last years. This is a new subject within political science and there is limited research made before. Because of that, this thesis will be empirical, inductive and exploring by its nature.

The Baltic Sea, due to its special conditions, is a unique and vulnerable marine environment. There are many pressures that have an impact on the sea and one of the major problems is the extensive flow of nutrients from land. The most visible effect of the supply of nutrients is the annual algal blooms. One of the main sources of nitrogen and phosphorus supply is agriculture. Nutrient losses from arable land have been increasing as agricultural production has intensified. At the end of the twentieth century an increased awareness of these problems led to the formation of organizations such as HELCOM and Baltic 21.