In the global and national discourse, schools are made responsible for providing high quality education in core subject knowledge, but also for working with physical and mental health promotion and risk prevention. This study analyses local interpretations and dissemination of health promotion and risk prevention in official websites from Swedish municipalities and schools in disadvantaged areas, with particular focus on school social work and how the counsellor’s (skolkurator) role comes across and how children and parents are addressed. The results show great variation in how the tasks of the school health services and the role of the counsellor are defined and explicated, which indicates difficulties in translating policy into practice. In the websites, the services that the school counsellor can offer often come across as abstract and/or distant from the potential needs of children and parents. Moreover, very few sites address children and/or the parents–the stakeholders are not ‘spoken to’. This goes against previous studies that stress the importance of providing information about the support that the school can offer children and parents, and of addressing the stakeholders. Decision-makers and school leadership must better identify and communicate what health promotion and risk prevention mean, and the role of the school counsellor, and inform families through the official websites about the support that the schools offer.
This article has a focus on how discursive positioning is carried out during encounters between people in the daily routine of social work, and how a basis for “otherness” can be created through positioning during the social work encounters. Social work practice includes discursive activity between social workers and clients, and the occurrence of stories is seen as a central element in this activity. Narratives have in earlier studies been described as tools used in social work practice, and parts of the narrative are often documented and compiled with the rest of the information gathered to serve as a basis for professionals’ actions. Theories relating to the narrative relayed during the encounter between social worker and client have evolved over the past few decades, and this development is also reflected in social work research. One key theme that has emerged in this research is the use of narratives to categorize the clients in the social services. Analyses carried out in recent years, however, have gradually become ever more refined, and show how people position themselves in relation to others on the basis of words such as “we” and “them”. This article gives an overview of this development in social work research with the use of empirical examples from social work practices in different fields of social services, from the encounters in social work offices, and assessment meetings in eldercare, and from team talk among professionals.
Since the 1990s, social work has been subject to requirements for monitoring and quality assurance. Here we examine one of the monitoring systems: Open Comparisons (OC). Gradually expanded and published online by a national agency, the OC now has around 350 indicators that cover major areas within social work in Sweden. We use program theory to clarify the operational idea in which OC is based. To do this, we analyse domestic violence data gathered from two social service organizations, from the regional level and from governmental agencies. The results show a strong normative support for OC within national level. However, OC is time consuming, its data are questionable, and its reliance on name-and-shame seems dubious. OC represents a trend in social work that may influence changes in routines and provide new kinds of performance measurements that affect how social work is organized.
In Sweden, young people are assessed in institutions at the request of the social services, a situation that can be described as being in limbo, in a state of uncertainty. Using the concepts of self-presentation and institutional processes in total institutions, this research aims to analyse young people’s perceptions of being assessed in secure accommodation. The empirical material consists of repeated interviews with 16 adolescents assessed in secure accommodation. Three situations were identified in which the young people felt that their self-presentations were in some way in or out of their control: the placement situation; the assessment situation and the assessment-outcome situation. The youths perceived their self-presentations to be influenced by the setting (i.e., the institution). In addition, there were two parts to being in limbo: being on site in the institution and being distant from the social services. The young people’s experience of being assessed in an institution was characterized by feelings of a loss of control over self-presentation and of their perceptions of themselves.
Older people ageing with severe mental illness (SMI) usually fall in between mental health care and old age care services. The role of informal care in filling this gap is recognized. The role of other welfare providers, such as voluntary organizations, is unclear. The aim of this article is to analyze and discuss local voluntary organizations' ability to recognize and respond to the needs of older people with SMI in the community.
11 local organizations focusing on mental illness, social care or old age were identified in a mid-sized Swedish city. Seven voluntary organizations participated in the study.
Our analysis revealed three overarching themes: 'Age as a non-issue?', 'Public and voluntary sector (non)links' and 'organizational vulnerabilities'. Our results show that older people with SMI are to some extent also invisible in the voluntary sector. We were also able to discern differences in the 'we-for-us' organizations that provide support for their own members with SMI, and 'we-for-them' organizations that provide help to a broader group.
Overall, older people with SMI remain a relatively invisible as a group for the voluntary organizations. We discuss these findings in relation to the specificity of the group and welfare contexts of voluntary work in communities.
Violence against women and men is a widespread and serious social problem, often with severe consequences for the victims. Even though young men are among those most at risk of exposure to physical violence, men’s victimization is only recognized to a limited extent. The aim of this study is to deepen our understanding of how social workers’ interpretation of the position of males in the gender order affects their understanding of male victimization. The study was designed as a multiple case study with a qualitative comparative approach. Focus group interviews supported by vignettes were used to collect data. Interviews were carried out with professional Swedish social workers working with victimized men and women at centres for young crime victims in Sweden. The results show that even though the social workers express traditional gender beliefs about young men’s experiences of victimization and their inability to identify themselves as victims of violence, they also to some extent resist taken-forgranted notions of male victimization. The results also show that the social workers to some extent offer supportive measures that reinforce traditional expectations of masculinity. On the basis of the results it is suggested that one important way of developing social work with young male victims of violence would be to give greater attention to variations between different men and masculinities and how these different forms of masculinity are differently connected to crime and violence, and to adapt supportive measures to reflect these differences.
Few studies have looked at care provided by older caregivers. This study analysed the characteristics of older informal caregivers and investigated how those caregivers interacted with other informal caregivers and the formal care system. The ‘Icelandic Older People’ (ICEOLD) survey provided data for 782 participants, of whom 157 were caregivers aged 65 years and older. The analysis demonstrated that older people who live with someone are more often informal caregivers than those who live alone. Emotional support was the most frequent help provided. The older caregiver was often alone in his/her role as a caregiver, but when the care was extensive, the formal care system provided support in addition to the care provided by the older caregiver. Almost half of the older caregivers needed help themselves, mostly with ‘Instrumental Activities of Daily Living’ (IADL). This study provides information about older caregivers and how their care interacts with the formal care system. This group is likely to grow as more people live longer. Thus, the number of older caregivers and the care they provide must be taken into account when making plans to care for older people in the coming years.
Standardisation and standards are common in the modern world, including in social work. This article focuses on social workers who implement the assessment tool Children’s needs in focus (Barns behov i centrum BBIC) in Swedish social work with children and families. Inspired by ‘siblings’ in the UK, the National Board of Health and Welfare has developed and supported the implementation of the BBIC. From the start, the implementation strategy was to engage well-educated and experienced social workers as educators. The article studies these educators (standardizers) as mediators between national imperatives and local practice during the implementation of the BBIC in the social services. Based on interviews with 10 BBIC educators, three standardizer roles were identified: the instrumental, the adaptive and the transformative. These roles affect the practice of social work in potentially different ways.
One of the challenges facing child welfare services (CWS) in Sweden is offering equal services to all children in need of protection and support. International research has suggested that unequal access to CWS exists but in Sweden the research evidence is weaker. This retrospective cross-sectional study of child welfare investigations focuses on the extent to which differences exist in social workers’ assessment of risk, need and decisions on services for children suspected of exposure to physical violence by a parent, which cannot be explained by the individual child’s documented risk exposure. A random sample of reports during the period 2018–2020 was drawn from seven CWS offices. Frequencies for background characteristics were obtained and comparisons between groups were performed using Chi2 and t-test. We carry out statistical analyses of the relationship between child and family characteristics and social workers’ determination of risk, need, and decision on services. We also investigate the relationship between documented risk factors and social workers’ determination of risk, need, and decision on services. Our study did not find any clear evidence of unequal provision of services based on child or family characteristics. Results indicate that cumulative risk and marital status appear to be the main determining factors for assessments of risk, need and decision on services. However, after adjusting for several background factors, the main explanatory variables underlying decisions on services are accumulated risk and economic stress. Although we must interpret these findings with caution, these results are in line with previous studies.
Internationalization of higher education and international social work are commonly accepted as positive developments. However, the quest for creating international knowledge and programmes is not free from difficulties. In this article, we problematize the process of internationalizing social work programs through the perspective of social work students. With two study sites, one in Sweden and one in South Africa, we discuss the meaning and challenges associated with internationalization by drawing on the emerging disparity between personal and professional points of view. We conclude by reflecting upon the role of social work educators in translating the ideas of internationalization to the future social workers.