The purpose of this study was to deepen the understanding of how the social workers' self-images are affected by how they perceive public attitudes and news media's portrayal of their profession as well as understanding how they are coping with it. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), which focuses on how individuals experience a certain phenomenon, has been used as a method. One of IPA's theoretical underpinnings is symbolic interactionism and therefore experiences which have effect on a person's self-image is significant. The results show that social workers perceive public attitudes as mainly negative and that the media often portrays social workers in a negative way, which aligns with previous studies. Furthermore, there seems to be a dissonance between the social workers' view of their professional role and how they feel that others perceive them, which led to the use of cognitive dissonance as a theory to support the results in the analysis. The social workers use different strategies to lessen the discomfort that emerges from the dissonance. For instance they tend to avoid telling others what they work with. A successful reduction of the dissonance can help the social workers to maintain a positive self-image.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-197374 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Maria, Nordenström, Viktoria, Vallberg |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för socialt arbete |
| 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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