The overall purpose of this essay was to provide a better understanding of the importance of discretion for social workers in direct social services. To answer the purpose three questions were formulated: (1) How do social workers define and describe their discretion and their ability to independently accomplish their work? (2) How do social workers experience that workplace organization, policies and economic conditions interact with their discretion and (3) How do social workers experience that the interaction with the client can affect how they use their discretion in the individual case? The method used was qualitative interviews. The theoretical framework was Michael Lipskys (1980) Street-level bureaucracy and the four themes organization, professional role, skills and interaction. The results showed that the respondents, although they did not consider themselves to be affected by the economy still adapted to budget restrictions when they said that they were cost conscious in their work. This adjustment to budget framework could possibly be what made them not feel limited in their work. The organization around the direct social work varied, in spite of this showed the result a broad consensus in the experiences of discretion in direct social work.

Studiens syfte var att undersöka vilka former av psykisk ohälsa som skolkuratorer mötte samt hur de arbetade med detta. Vi har därför utfört en kvalitativ studie och intervjuat sex skolkuratorer som arbetar med högstadieelever. Resultatet visade att psykisk ohälsa var ett mångtydigt begrepp, men att de mest centrala formerna av psykisk ohälsa i skolan var stress, prestationsångest och självskadebeteende. Skolkuratorernas arbetsuppgifter upplevdes som diffusa, men de tre mest framträdande arbetsuppgifterna i samband med psykisk ohälsa var kartläggning, enskilda samtal samt att remittera elever vidare till andra aktörer. Skolkuratorerna fokuserade främst på akuta insatser vilket resulterade i att det förebyggande arbetet att motverka psykisk ohälsa blev eftersatt. Deras samverkan inom elevhälsan beskrevs vara betydelsefull för att upptäcka och hantera psykisk ohälsa. / The aim of this study was to explore what kind of mental illness school counselors encounter and work with in school, we have therefore conducted a qualitative study and interviewed six school counselors who work with high school students. The results showed that mental illness was an ambiguous term, but the most significant forms of mental illness encountered were stress, performance anxiety and self-harm. School counselors work was perceived as vague, but the three most prominent tasks associated with mental illness were charting, individual counseling and to support students to other professionals. The school counselors focused primarily on acute interventions which resulted that preventive work to avoid mental illness being neglected. Their collaboration in student health care was described to be important for detecting and managing mental illness.

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published_or_final_version / Criminology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

Traditionally, employment advice and guidance services in the UK have occupied distinct realms despite government efforts to align and integrate the education and skills and welfare-to-work frameworks. Conceptually, studies of front-line service delivery have often adopted a street-level perspective. This study offers a governance approach that focuses on how adviser behaviour is steered through managerial methods and how advisers steer user behaviour through the use of discretion and trust. The study explored how advisers mediated the tensions between managerial concerns and user needs to achieve policy goals, among others to turn service users into more active citizens. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews with service managers and advisers in combination with service characteristics and policy aims, a service typology was developed which was then applied to eight case study services. The analysis showed that employment advisers in the different service types applied very diverse strategies to achieve an outcome for the service user, but that within service types the strategies were similar. Due to the different service structures and advisers’ varying ability to apply discretion, various kinds of trust could be established, which potentially allowed the advisers to influence a change of service user behaviour. This could range from highly coercive methods to empowering individuals. The findings showed that advisers were subject to similar pressures as they applied to service users when mediating managerial influences. There was evidence that ability to use discretion was a vital pivot point in how advisers mediated tension between the service demands and user needs. This in turn was related to the adviser’s ability to achieve sustainable outcomes for the service user.

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. An additional finding was that being a school social worker is often a solitary role in the organization, and therefore most of them highlight the importance of enjoying independent work and having a co-worker to discuss their work with.

In British Columbia (BC) foresters registered with the Association of BC Forest Professionals (ABCFP) have been given the exclusive right to practise professional forestry. As with all professions there is an expectation that Registered Professional Foresters (RPFs) conduct their activities in an ethical manner and are therefore obligated to act as an ethical agent on behalf of society regarding forest resources. If a certain level of ethical agency is desired of professionals we need to understand whether or not an RPF possesses the ability (defined as their discretion) to sufficiently fulfil this responsibility. Rule-based and principle-based standards of forest management, an RPF’s scope of practice, and the socio-political framework of public forest management in BC all come together to define an RPF’s discretionary context, which sets the limits to an RPF’s discretion. This context is highly idiosyncratic to a specific situation or decision and this makes the RPF’s discretion similarly idiosyncratic. This suggests that an RPF should not be accountable for a standard of ethical agency that does not reflect the context-dependent level of discretion they possess. Fifteen interviews of RPFs were conducted for this study to discuss their approach to ethical decision making. The analysis of the interviews revealed 12 major themes, several of which appear to be highly idiosyncratic to the situations described by the participants. The way these themes were perceived by the participants revealed the differences in the discretionary context of their situations. Several aspects of ethical deliberation emerged from the data that appear to be particular to broad employer categories, including delegated decision-making (government), economic and forest health considerations (industry), and the tension between personal and professional values (consultants).

In this study, I examine the factors that influence school districts’ commitment to implement ESL (English as a Second Language) education in compliance with the federal Bilingual Education Act of 1968. To explain variation in implementation effort, I focus on several features of the local implementation environment, including the role of Latino descriptive representation. Utilizing data on all public school districts in Texas, I employ a Heckman two-stage estimation procedure that accounts for factors that influence school districts’ decisions to implement bilingual education programs as well as factors that affect the amount of resources school districts are willing to allocate towards bilingual education. The results indicate that Latino school board and teacher representation play a positive and statistically significant role in determining: 1) whether school districts implement bilingual education programs; and 2) the level of expenditures and teacher positions allocated towards bilingual education. Thus, policy implementation outcomes translate into substantive representation.

The aim of the study was, through qualitative interviews with school counsellors in Swedish primary schools, to study what the counsellors are experiencing condition their ability to work proactively according to the Swedish Education Act provisions on student health. During the study, six interviews with school counsellors who worked in the same suburbs, was conducted. The theoretical approach that was used is Michael Lipsky's theory of street-level bureaucrats and the term discretion. The overall outcome of the study was that the interviewed school counsellors felt that they did not have good opportunities to work preventively as the Education Act requires. The main reason for this was the school counsellor’s heavy workload. The results of the study were divided into three categories, which in turn were followed by several themes to highlight the conditions governing school counsellor’s opportunity to work preventatively.