The background of this paper is the dual role that the social worker can have, of beeing both supportive and controlling in the meeting with clients. It is also about the power the social worker can have, how they handle the power in their profession and how they remain to it in the relationship with the client. The study is qualitative and built on interviews with eight social workers that work in different areas in the social services. We have chosen to see this dual role as if the social workers have to, in their daily work, handle the roles as one authority role and one supportive role towards the client. The purpose of this study is to understand how the dual role as the social worker has in the profession, as a helper and a authority, is expressed in the work and relationship with the client. We have turned this purpose into two questions: How do social workers with authority remain to the dual roles of the profession? How do the social workers describe and understand power? We don´t want to generalize in this study, we want to give an example of the social workers own experiences about the dual role. Our theoretical point of view is the pastoral power, street-level bureaucracy and human service organizations. We have also been using earlier research. The analyze and result is presented together, split into five themes. The result shows that the social workers does not see the roles as two different, they see it as one intertwined. The results also show that the social workers see power only when they take decisions that are negative for the clients. We finish of the paper with a discussion about our reflections on the results and some thoughts on how to proceed with research in this subject.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-27924 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Magnusson, Ida-Lina, Berglund, Sara |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för socialt arbete, SA, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för socialt arbete, SA |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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