Mellan det sagda och det outsägliga : om socialsekreterares kompetens i barnavårdsutredningar

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The purpose of this essay is to examine the concept of competence within the social services. More specifically it aims to find out how the social workers themselves look upon their own competence in social investigations concerning children. As the study was based on focus groups the main questions were vague at the beginning and were cleared later on during the group sessions. In three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden 11 social workers were asked to discuss this issue. The interviews were then thoroughly transcribed. In the data I identified 9 themes seeming to play a special roll in the discussions about competence: practice; experience; approach; intuition; responsibility; theories, methods and laws; reflection; resources and ethics; specialisation versus integration. The analysis made on these themes was based on two different kinds of perspective; one focusing knowing-in-action and the other focusing the organization framing the competence considered. As a conclusion the 7 first themes can be seen as a definition of the competence used in social investigations concerning children. They include both the skills, the know-how and the lack of competence, the deficit. Even though these 7 themes define the competence, they have to be understood in ...