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| 2. |
- Nygren, Lennart, Professor emeritus, 1953-, et al.
(författare)
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Welfare regimes and social workers' conceptions of social problems and professional roles : a comparative study of Chile, Ireland, Lithuania and Sweden
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Comparative Social Work. - : Stavanger University Library. - 0809-9936. ; 18:2, s. 207-235
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article compares social work in countries representing four different welfare regimes: Chile, the Republic of Ireland (refer to elsewhere as ‘Ireland’), Lithuania and Sweden. The aim is to examine how social workers in different contexts refer to families’ complex needs, how contextual factors influence social workers’ positions and actions, and how they make sense of their work. Social workers in 15 focus groups, 4 per country except for Chile with 3, were interviewed about their conceptions of ‘family’, ‘families with complex needs’, and reasoning about interventions in relation to a fictitious complex case vignette. The understanding of complex needs appears relatively individualized in Chile and Lithuania, while contextual factors were more pronounced in the Irish and Swedish material. Chile, exemplifying a familialized family policy regime, reflects a poverty-compensatory social worker role that also supports familial reproduction; Ireland, a partly de-familialized regime, reflects a supportive and risk-reactive role; Lithuania, a re-familialized regime reflects a patriarchal risk-reducing role and Sweden, a de-familialized policy regime, reflects a rights-oriented and technocratic role. Welfare regimes shape different social work practice contexts. However, to some extent, social workers around the world share a common work ethos in how they, for the best interest of the people they work with, deal with the cross-pressure from social problems and political-ideological priorities.
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- Oltedal, Siv, et al.
(författare)
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The use of vignettes in an international comparative social work research : In-practice and on-practice reflections on practices
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Comparative Social Work. - : Stavanger University Library. - 0809-9936. ; 18:2, s. 236-248
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this article is to reflect on the strengths and challenges in qualitative comparative research on personal social services. The specific methodological approach that these reflections emerge from is the application of case vignettes in focus group interviews with social workers, working in different welfare regimes.We describe the process of vignette construction and implementation in focus group interviews, and relate this to findings in a large international project with researchers and data from Chile, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Ireland and the UK.Findings reveal that some globally spread professional norms prevail when they are applied locally, while others are more formed through welfare systems with strong contextual norms and legal and socio-economic barriers. Furthermore, the project showed that to use case vignettes and focus groups, in order to compare ‘social work’ in its totality between countries, is really difficult. It appears more fruitful to use such research methods to compare subsectors and sub-disciplines instead of social work as a whole. The strength of the data retrieved from the study is that it makes it possible to separate information on actual practice from information on principles and system norms, thus providing in-practice and on-practice reflections.
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| 4. |
- Bengtsson, Mattias
(författare)
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Att lämna en placering i samhällsvård : En studie om ungas övergång från samhällsvård till vuxenliv
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The focus in this thesis is young peoples’ (aged 17–20) experiences of leaving out-of-home care (OHC) and making the transition into adulthood. Prior research shows care leavers as a vulnerable group making the transition to adulthood at younger age, in shorter duration and with less support than their peers. The overarching aim is to gain knowledge of how young care leavers experience and handle their transition from OHC to adulthood, and how their experiences and strategies change over time. The study design is longitudinal with three waves of interviews: when still in care (T1), 6–11 months later when most of them had left care (T2) and another 10–19 months later (T3). Article I focuses the informants’ (n=15) expectations for their future and how these are changing over time (T1–T2). The participants’ short term expectations are characterized by worries (T1) and ambivalence (T2) – their long-term expectations are more optimistic (both T1 and T2) and tend to be guided by normative developmental patterns. The aim of article II is to study care leavers’ (n=20) strategies for handling adversities during their OHC transition. The results show that the participants over time (T1–T2) develop externally oriented strategies by navigating towards available resources, and internally oriented reflexive strategies for re-negotiating the meaning of their earlier experiences. Departing from an agency perspective article III focuses care leavers’ (n=14) transitional patterns of leaving care (T1–T3). Three patterns are identified: one stable long-term future oriented, one unstable short-term future oriented and one ambivalent pattern shuttling between long- and short-term future orientations. The aim in article IV is to study occupational trajectories, i.e. care leavers’ (n=14) paths into education and employment from a theoretical framework of agency vs. structure. The results show three ideal types of trajectories where agency is: (1) facilitated by structure, (2) perceived as free from structural constraints, and (3) hindered by structural constraints. The longitudinal design provides an original contribution the field of study by uncovering how care leavers’ expectations for their future is changing during the process of transition, how increasingly successful strategies are developed over time, and how transitional OHC patterns are influenced by the agents’ time horizons as well as by structural forces. A conclusion from the study is that societal support targeting young care leavers is deficient and needs to be developed and strengthened. Furthermore, the transition could be facilitated by extending the duration of the transition process, by including care leavers as active participating agents in the planning process of their passage out from OHC, and by strengthening the maintenance of care leavers’ relationships to supportive members in their formal and informal network. ”Independence” as the ultimate goal for young people leaving OHC is criticized based on the results showing that interdependent relationships to significant others is an integrated part of care leavers’ perception of adult life.
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| 5. |
- Blom, Björn, 1965-, et al.
(författare)
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Analys av korta narrativ
- 2021. - 2
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Ingår i: Att forska i socialt arbete. - Lund : Studentlitteratur AB. - 9789144131603 ; , s. 165-197
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 7. |
- Nygren, Lennart, 1953-
(författare)
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Vad kännetecknar forskning i socialt arbete?
- 2021. - 2
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Ingår i: Att forska i socialt arbete. - Lund : Studentlitteratur AB. - 9789144131603 ; , s. 15-29
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 10. |
- Gümüscü, Ahmet, et al.
(författare)
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Social work and the management of complexity in Swedish child welfare services
- 2020
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Ingår i: Nordic Social Work Research. - : Routledge. - 2156-857X .- 2156-8588. ; 10:3, s. 257-269
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper elucidates how Swedish child welfare social workers manage complexity co-occuring in the families with which they work and the organisational contexts of practice. Focus groups were held with social workers in three municipalities in Sweden who described work processes generally and in response to a fictitious vignette. The vignette was constructed as a complex family situation to explore how social workers approach complexity when faced with a family with complex needs. Findings showed that social workers are challenged in their everyday work where they are aware of the many needs in a family. They focus on immediate conditions for children while recognising that some problems are less amenable to being solved. However they try to manage complexities related to families as well as the structural conditions of work by sorting, prioritising and oscillating between a child focus and a family service orientation. This paper serves as a necessary reminder of the complexity of social work in the broader area of child welfare and raises further questions about the use of comparative typologies to explain social work practices
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