There are an increasing number of unaccompanied children coming to Sweden. Sweden is one of the countries in the world that receive many of them. This awoke my interest to investigate the assessment of financial assistance and “other living expenses” considering unaccompanied children. My approach was a qualitative study including interviewing five social secretaries working in five different districts in Malmö. Theories used to analyze collected data were: organization theory, bureaucracy school, decision making and cognition and Sence of Coherence. Eight themes were identified: briefing profession, knowledge, values, the individual needs in centrum, assessment of "other living expenses", Malmö City Guidelines, Framework as working tool and finally labour division. These together increase our understanding of the assessment of financial assistance.The result of my study shows that three factors contribute to the assessment of financial support. 1) Social Service law which is a frame law. 2) The national and local rule tools that complement the law. 3) The social secretaries personal view of the law, frameworks and unaccompanied children. The social workers did not have an internal or external education about the unaccompanied children’s situation or the child perspective. They rather took personal responsibility to help them.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the municipal guidelines regarding the construction of the prerequisite "other living expenses", and how the construction of the prerequisite was constructed in relation to the legislation. The sample of the thesis was the municipalities in Stockholm’s county. The empirical result was compiled with the hermeneutical method, and analyzed through a legal perspective and three different theoretical perspectives, as well as compared with previous studies. The theoretical perspectives were legal pluralism, bureaucracy, legitimacy and rule of law. The results of the thesis pointed out differences between the municipalities concerning the assessment of social assistance to purposes included in "other living expenses". The differences that appeared in the thesis was due to that the social services act is as a framework law, which allows local adjustments and has a general construction with vague concepts. The differences between municipalities make the administration of the social assistance turn out different for the client depending in which municipality he/she lives in. The results of the thesis showed that municipal guidelines did neither contribute to uniform the assessment of social assistance in Sweden, as intended nor raised the rule of law.