Research on psychosocial health in social work isn't developed enough. Instead, there's much more research on psychosocial unhealth. What about social workers, the unhealth is often related to the situation at work and the work environment. The aim of this study was to "during interviews understand the factors which social workers experience as important to maintain their own psychosocial health in the life situations". With hermeneutic method the particular interest was directed on how the participants experienced and explained their psychosocial health on the basis of their life situations, and the results was analyzed with Antonovsky's (1991/2005) perspective directed on health and Sense of Coherence (SOC). In the study, we used a qualitative form of interviews which allowed our participants to answer with their own words and from how they interpreted the questions. We have made interviews with eight social workers in a average municipality in Sweden. The results are shown qualitatively in current text. With our interest in social workers´ psychosocial health, we have understood that it's complicated to make a partition line between the life at work and the private life when it comes to the social workers´ experiences of factors that helps to maintain psychosocial health. Instead, it's about to understand the social worker's psychosocial health as a whole, on the basis of the work as well as the private life. In comparison to research on psychosocial unhealth, our participants said that it's especially the private life, rather than the life at work, that influences and sometimes even controls the psychosocial health in general. Nevertheless, there were plural factors at work which were experienced as especially important to maintain the psychosocial health, for example a "good director", "good colleagues", "ability to let go of the liability for clients" and a working situation where you "work two together" plus "experience and knowledge" from the whole life situations. In private life, and in addition to work, the experiences were about "enriching leisure time", social support from friends and family and the ability to make "reasonable demands and limits for yourself" in private life as well as at work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-29595 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Gustafsson, Amanda, Lindgren, Pia |
| 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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