The purpose of this essay was to examine how professional social workers work with follow up foster home placements. The study was based on qualitative interviews with ten professional social workers from different municipalities in Skåne in an attempt to answer the following questions:
* What routines exist for the follow-up work with foster care?
* What factors have an impact on how the follow-up is formed in the particular case?
* How can the follow-up affect outcomes of the placement?
* In what way could the work with follow-up foster home placements develop?
The theories we chose to analyze our material from was the ecology of human development formed by Urie Bronfenbrenner and the theory of civil courage formed by Lennart Lundquist. The interviews were semi-structural which gave the respondents a chance to talk in a free way about the questions we presented.
The result of the study showed that there is a difference in the way social workers form the follow-up work of foster care. The greatest difference is in whom the social workers include in their follow-up. We found a clear difference between the social workers who included the biological parents in the child's life and those who did not. We found that it is of great importance for the child to have access to their biological parents, or at least to know who they are. Otherwise the risk increases of a failured placement.
We were able to isolate a number of factors that have an impact in how the follow-up is formed. For example, the problems around the child and the parents attitude towards the foster care. It was also clear that the quality of the follow-up was affected by the professional social workers workload. We found that the outcome of the care was formed by how the work was formed from the beginning. In particular, the amount of time that the social worker invests in each individual case is crucial for the outcome of the placement. We also found that the social workers have no common frame, for the follow-up, on their ...
