Over the last few decades there has been a significant increase when it comes to mental ill health amongst Swedish schoolchildren. The school counselor has a crucial role both when it comes to detecting and to deal with these social problems. But according to recent studies the school counselors’ profession seems to lack a universal-based defined job description which has led to a decreased autonomy as well as legitimacy-related issues. This made us ask ourselves if the school counselors’ competence is used to its full potential. The overarching purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of how school social workers experience and perceive health-promoting work based on their professional role. The specific aims were to answer the following questions: How do school teachers experience health promotion at school? How does the school counselor perceive their professional role? Our method in order to collect our empirical data was to through semistructured interviews with six school counselors in Sweden. To help increase the understanding of our data we used profession-theory and also role-theory. The summarized findings are that the school counselors are a part of a group created to support the schoolchildren’s health. This group is heavily affected by the school organization’s resource assets and the school counselors’ perception is that there aren’t enough time nor enough professionals working with school-based health-promotion compared to the amount of students attending the school. We also found that the school counselors have different room, a different degree of autonomy, in order to influence the structure of the health-promoting work at school. Our conclusion is that this difference seems to depend on the principal as well as on the type of employment the school counselor has. The externally employed school counselor experienced much more autonomy compared to the internal employees. Furthermore, the school principal is proven to have a strong impact on the school counselors’ professional role and the school counselors have experienced legitimacy-related issues towards certain teachers due to their undefined job description.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-76216 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Ek, Micael, Shatri, Kushtrim |
| 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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