The purpose of this study is to find out how social workers in one medium and one small municipality in central Sweden perceive the need of financial support for young adults for more than one year and what the causes might be. To answer our research questions a qualitative research method was used and four social workers were interviewed. The result has been analyzed based of social exclusion, stigma, as well as on structural and individual level and linked to previous research. Our results show that although young adults are an exception for long duration for financial support, there are those who lack other means of support for a long time. The results also show that young adults often are recurring in the social services, and they are long-lasting. The reasons for the need have been shown to be similar in the medium and the smaller municipality, even if it appears differences seen to affect the clients. The result shows that the absence of school results, mental illness, security and organization of social services are causes of long- term need for income support. The study shows that the long-standing young adults often lack a secure social network and social workers perceive that they are often a security, a stable contact in the young adults' lives that may be difficult for these young adults to leave.

Scholars and policy makers alike argue that leaders of democracies should find it in their interest to provide high levels of social services due to a fear of being voted out of office. Yet, I find that Africa's newer democracies provide levels of social services strikingly similar to what the continent's existing non-democracies supply. This dissertation seeks to explain why this is the case. I start by exploring the determinants of Africa's most recent wave of democratization, and find that much of Africa's 1990s democratic wave can be attributed to changes in foreign circumstances rather than from pressures from domestic democratic movements. I argue democratization has become disassociated with social services on the continent because of this exogenous nature of political liberalization. Rather than institutionalizing electoral incentives to provide social services, leadership of exogenously derived democracies become principally accountable to the foreign actors for whom political change was meant to appease. However, foreign actors are effectively unable and unwilling to demand political reforms that will institutionalize a more responsive democracy. This dynamic threatens any electoral incentive a ruling party might have to produce higher levels of social services. I test this argument quantitatively and find support for the notion that exogeneity of political change has dampened the impact that democratization has had on social service delivery in Africa. Additionally, through in-country, qualitative fieldwork I examine how citizens demand social services and how the government responds to such demands in Zambia, a country whose democratization was heavily influenced by foreign pressure. There, I found that while there were important initial strides made by Zambia's post-transition government to institutionalize a higher level of responsiveness in social services, later erosions in Zambia's checks and balances undermined these gains. Finally, using Afrobarometer's cross-national survey data, I explore what impact foreign influenced democratization has on citizens' attachment to and satisfaction with democracy. I find that exogenously derived democratization has a small negative impact on people's attachment to democracy and satisfaction with the way democracy works in their country. I conclude by discussing some of the policy implications of these findings.

Research shows that supervisors in the social service field require on-going training and supervision; however, we do not know much about supervisors’ training and supervision and whether it prepares supervisors for the responsibilities of their jobs. This study used a telephone survey to explore the training and supervision experiences of community agency social service supervisors. The survey directly addressed 20 supervisory knowledge and skill areas identified from the literature review as those necessary for social service supervisors to be effective. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze participants’ responses and describe their training and supervision experiences. The goal of the study was to describe the training and supervision that supervisors receive to see if they address the supervisory knowledge and skill areas identified from the literature. Although the study found that supervisors access more training and supervision than expected, it also found significant inconsistencies in the training and supervision. / Graduate / 0534 / mahbrown@uvic.ca

Thesis (M.S.W.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-88). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

For a long time confined to Article 106(2) TFEU, a provision allowing to justify regulatory measures derogating from Treaty rules by invoking their necessity in order to enable undertakings entrusted with services of general economic interest (SGEIs) to fulfil their special tasks, SGEI has become a constitutional concept of EU law. In the post-Lisbon EU Treaties it is subject to new provisions, in particular Article 14 TFEU and the Protocol on services on general interest. As a legal concept allowing to balance EU market integration and the pursuit of legitimate national policies related to public services, SGEI is also a political concept, and therefore its legal interpretation is an ultra-sensitive matter. This dissertation proposes that SGEI cannot anymore be contrived as a narrow concept of EU competition law, but must be understood as a broad public service concept encompassing both public authorities’ policy missions and undertakings’ public service obligations. This follows from an analysis of the CJEU’s understanding of the EU concept of SGEI in the frame of Hirschman’s theory on exit and voice, and thus on the double background of its own case law foreclosing exit from EU market rules for public services, and of its acknowledgement of the SGEI “voice” this has led to in the Treaties. The analysis shows that the CJEU’s bifurcation by the notions of “public service obligations” and “public service tasks”, is aimed at applying the Treaty SGEI provisions loyally without pre-empting their political use by the Union and the Member States. To shed some light on the political use of the EU concept of SGEI made by the EU legislator and the Member States in a context of Europeanisation and liberalisation, this dissertation scrutinizes also how the new EU procurement and state aid rules applying to social services relate to the Treaty principles on SGEIs, and how the Swedish systems of choice for elderly home care and education relate to the EU rules. It analyses whether these relationships, if too transparent and loyal, may constrain the process of liberalisation of social services in the Member States, and whether it can explain that an explicit characterisation of social services as SGEIs seems to be avoided in EU procurement law and in Swedish law.

The purpose of this study was to make a qualitative study of how social services work is produced in local and national Swedish newspapers in connection with five child welfare cases. The starting point of the study was qualitative and based on five selected childcare cases with a total of 136 articles. To analyze these articles discourse analysis was used with inspiration from Foucault. The material was analyzed from the theory of framing and the concepts of power and scapegoat. The results and analysis section are divided into three main themes with subheadings. The first theme is about how it is written about the work of social services based on child welfare cases. The second theme is about scapegoats and the third theme deals with the similarities and differences we have found between the national and local newspaper articles. The results of the study have shown that the social services work with children and young people is presented as responsible for the events that are written and as an organization with deficiency. The result has also shown that the media has the power to choose who will be heard, what to publish and how to write about events. We have also analyzed how the newspapers choose to frame and highlight certain perspectives of an event through the theory of framing. We have found differences and similarities between how national and local newspapers write about social services work with children and young people.

Collaboration has been a central feature of Welsh Government policy in respect of delivering effective public services for over a decade yet continues to be difficult to achieve in a meaningful way across sectors, organisations and boundaries. The report of the Commission on Public Service Governance and Delivery in Wales (2014) reinforced the importance of pursuing collaborative initiatives and offered proposals for approaching collaboration more consistently and effectively. This thesis adds new knowledge to understanding the complexities of collaboration through a critical overview of three research outputs relating to collaboration in social services in Welsh local authorities. By reviewing the literature on collaborative theory and practice and applying it to the research outputs which constitute the portfolio, a conclusion is reached that collaboration will remain an elusive objective unless action is taken to improve its chances of successful implementation. A new strategy is proposed for obtaining the necessary increase in the scale and pace of collaboration to justify its position as a continuing part of Welsh Government policy.

The objective of my thesis ``Evaluation of the marketing strategy of selected social services facilities operating under the Social Services Act No. 108/2006 Coll., and its proposed innovation{\crqq} was to ascertain whether the facilities had been making use of any marketing strategy, and if so, in what fields. I also investigated the impact of the new Social Services Act on operation of the facilities, and whether there were any differences in usage of strategies in dependence on the founders of the facilities. Marketing of social care has not had a long history in the Czech Republic; it is a segment which has not been experiencing sufficient attention. Marketing is mostly used by private providers of social services.

The dissertation paper focuses on problems related to social services and mapping of changes that have taken place since the most recent update of the Act on Social Services (the Welfare Code). The theoretical part of the paper concentrates on the Act on Social Services whose enactment has brought many significant changes into the welfare system that impact above all on the providers and users of social services. The practical part of the paper describes the opinions that selected registered providers of social services have about the legislative update.

The thesis deals with the topic of ?The importance of quality inspection of the provision of social services in meeting the Quality Standards for Social Services in sheltered housing facilities?. The inspection is a social policy tool of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs the purpose of which is the inclusion of persons threatened by social exclusion. The main objective of the thesis was to determine the effect of the inspections on the quality of provided social services in sheltered housing facilities. Based on the gathered data the following hypothesis was formulated: The quality of the provided social services in sheltered housing facilities is not directly affected by the inspection. One of the partial objectives of the thesis was to determine the effect of the inspection of the provided social services on lives of residents in sheltered housing facilities and the following hypothesis was formulated for the purpose: The inspections of the provided social services do not have any significant impact on the lives of residents in sheltered housing facilities. The qualitative research related to the main objective used the technique of a semi-structured interview. The method selected for the qualitative research for the partial objective was inquiring by means of a questionnaire. The surveyed group consisted of 15 employees and 67 residents of sheltered housing facilities in Veselí nad Lužnicí, Ústí nad Orlicí and in Brno. Based on the above mentioned facts and the completed research I believe that the objectives of the thesis were met and the hypotheses were tested by means of two qualitative surveys.