O Serviço Social contracenando com a arte para desvelar a realidade

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

O estudo das novas legislações de estágio e o contexto no curso de serviço social da FCHS - UNESP- Campus de Franca

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

Formação profissional em Serviço Social: estágio supervisionado e a realidade do trabalhador estudante

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

Serviço Social e Educação: uma aproximação a partir do estado da arte

Pós-graduação em Serviço Social - FCHS

"En dörr in i samhället och ett fönster ut mot världen" – Föreningen som etnisk gränsöverskridande mötesplats och social integrationsaktör

Det här är en kvalitativ studie med syftet att studera föreningen som en etnisk gränsöverskridande mötesplats och social integrationsaktör. Metodologiskt strukturerades studien kring sju halvstrukturerade intervjuer med en föreningsordförande och föreningsaktiva medlemmar från en internationell vänskapsförening i en glesbygdskommun i Mellansverige. Empirin har analyserats utifrån en teoretisk utgångspunkt i socialt kapital. Resultatet visar att det både finns möjligheter för och hinder mot föreningen som etnisk gränsöverskridande mötesplats. Föreningen fungerar som etniskt överbryggande i betydelsen av att internt inom föreningen överbrygga etniska och språkliga skiljelinjer, men hinder mot att uppnå externa överbryggande värden begränsas av svårigheter att nå ut till närsamhället och till personer med svensk bakgrund i verksamheten. Föreningens betydelse som en social integrationsaktör framträder på tre centrala områden; föreningens betydelse för social gemenskap och socialt samspel och för kontakter och nätverk och slutligen som informationskanal. Föreningen har störst betydelse för föreningsaktiva med utländsk bakgrund, framförallt i ett socialt avseende.

Grandparents Left with AIDS-orphans; Challenges and Strategies Handling Poverty and Stigma

By 2010 it is estimated that one third of the African children will be orphans as an effect of HIV/AIDS. The crisis is already a fact and most orphans are absorbed by the extended family where the grandparents become the primary caretakers. This qualitative study was carried out in Kenya to explore the situation of these grandparents and to define their current resources and needs. Eight grandparents living in rural village or urban slum caring for their orphaned grandchildren were interviewed. The results showed that these families live under extremely poor conditions lacking food, other vital neccesities and a basic social network. Local churches and support groups emerged as the grandparents main sources to enhance strength and support. Key factors causing the acute poverty is HIV-related stigma and lack of access to land.

Tradition, Change and Variation : Past and Present Trends in Public Old-age Care

The general aim of this dissertation is to describe and analyse how public old-age care in Sweden has developed and changed during the last century. The study applies a provider perspective on how care has been planned and professionally carried out. A broader social policy perspective, studying old-age care at central/national as well as local/municipal level, is also developed. A special focus is directed at the large local variation in care and services for the elderly. The empirical base is comprised of official documents and other public sources, survey data from interviews with elderly recipients of public old-age care, and official statistics on publicly financed and controlled old-age care and services. Study I addresses the development of old-age care in Sweden during the twentieth century by studying an important occupation in this field – the supervisors and their professional roles, tasks and working conditions. Throughout, the roles of supervisors have followed the prevailing official policy on the proper way to provide care for elderly people in Sweden; from poor relief at the beginning of the 1900s, via a generous level of services in the 1960s and 1970s, to today’s restricted and economy-controlled mode of operation. Study II describes and compares two main forms of public old-age care in Sweden today, home help services and institutional care. The care-load found in home-based care was comparable to and sometimes even larger than in service-homes and other institutions, indicating that large care needs among elderly people in Sweden today can be met in their homes as well as in institutional settings. Studies III and IV analyse the local variation in public old-age care in Sweden. During the last decades there has been an overall decline in home help services. The coverage of home help for elderly people shows large differences between municipalities throughout this period, and the relative variation has increased. The local disparity seems to depend more on historical factors, e.g., previous coverage rates, than on the present municipal situation in levels of need or local economy and politics. In an introductory part the four papers are linked together by an outline of the demographic situation and the social policy model for old-age care in Sweden. Trends that have been apparent over time, e.g. professionalisation and market orientation, are traced and discussed. Conflicts between prevailing ideologies are analysed, in regards to for instance home-based and institution-based care, social and medical culture, and local and central levels of decision-making. ’Welfare municipality’, ‘path dependency’, and ‘decentralisation’ are suggested as a conceptual framework for describing the large and increasing local variations in old-age care. Finally, implications of the four studies with regard to old-age care policy and further research are discussed.

Servizi relazionali e inclusione sociale: due studi di caso sul coinvolgimento delle famiglie nel Comune di Parma

La presente ricerca muove i suoi primi passi dall’ipotesi generale che il paradigma relazionale possa offrire al mondo dei servizi sociali una configurazione diversa, talora meno utopistica, del community work. Sebbene, infatti, in questi anni il sistema di offerta dei servizi si sia arricchito di principi come la co-progettazione e la co-responsabilità delle azioni, il lavoro di comunità resta ancora molto distante dal lavoro generalmente svolto nei servizi sociali territoriali, incapaci per ragioni strutturali e culturali di accogliere dentro di sé tale funzione. L’idea dalla quale trae origine la presente tesi di dottorato, è pertanto quella di arricchire la definizione di servizi sociali relazionali. Partendo dalle dimensioni che in letteratura sociologica e nei principali modelli teorici di social work definiscono un servizio alla persona quale servizio relazionale, nella prima parte teorica viene ipotizzata una trasformazione parziale del welfare regionale emiliano, poiché ai mutamenti culturali di questi anni non ha fatto seguito un cambiamento reale dei modelli operativi maggiormente basati sullo sviluppo delle competenze. Nella seconda parte della tesi, la ricerca empirica si focalizza sui progetti “family friendly” realizzati nel Comune di Parma, collocati in una logica di welfare societario e basati sull’apporto di soggetti di Terzo Settore, responsabili di ogni fase di realizzazione delle attività. La ricerca si avvale prevalentemente di tecniche qualitative e in alcuni tratti assume le caratteristiche della ricerca-azione. Nelle conclusioni, il contesto territoriale studiato rivela grande ricchezza dei legami strutturali, ma anche necessità di un rafforzamento dei legami interni. La forza dei servizi prodotti si situa, inoltre, nella sovrafunzionalità del legame tra volontari e famiglie, e di questo elemento dovrebbe arricchirsi anche il social work che scelga di adottare una prospettiva metodologica di lavoro relazionale.

Between Equity and Empathy: Social Professions and the New Accountability

This article explores the practical and ethical implications of the ‘new accountability’ (working to procedures, targets and standards) based on interviews with British social professionals. Although similar tendencies are present in other European countries, in Britain the rule-bound nature of social work is more intense. Practitioners who regard the ‘new accountability’ positively justify their views with reference to utilitarian and rights-based arguments relating to the promotion of good outcomes, the achievement of equity, respecting the consumer rights of service users and the rights of other stakeholders to information and value for money. Those practitioners who view the new accountability requirements negatively seem to speak in a different ‘moral voice’, which can be linked to more personal and situated approaches to ethics, stressing the importance of particular relationships in context, trust, sensitivity and a sense of ‘vocation’. Both ‘voices’ are part of professional practice, but the new accountability stresses the former at the expense of the latter. For social work to play the critical role identified by Walter Lorenz, maintaining a creative balance between equity and empathy will be important.

Die soziale Ökonomie des Gemeinwesens - Eine sozialpolitische Entwicklungsaufgabe

Community work and development - Now, that market economy is no longer faced with territorial boundaries, the spheres of life within the limits of local communities are gaining new importance in terms of sustained patterns of development. This extended meaning of local community as a place for mastering the challenges of life and as a framework for developing future-oriented solutions to social, ecological and economic problems, corresponds to the extended meaning of community-based social work as an effort to shape social life and generate social change. Community-economy follows the original sense of human economy, defined by Aristotle. It is the idea of the “oikos”, an economy for the satisfaction of needs of the “whole house” - of the young and the old, the healthy and sick, of the living and future generations and the not-human world. In this sense “oikonomia” means household management.

Towards the Transversalism of Social Pedagogy

The text below is a small contribution to this discussion about the search for ontological, epistemological and axiological references, which enable us to develop hypotheses that explain social events and processes within the field of social work. It is also a very synthetic presentation of social pedagogy’s point of view on the processes and individually enacted events that occur in the field of practice. We describe this point of view as the transversal dimension of social pedagogy. The thesis of the viewpoint presented here refers to an expectation that social pedagogy, understood as a certain theoretical construct (epistemological-ontological-axiological), will provide us with an orientation for social action undertaken in the field of social practice.

Enabling Access to Welfare Services - the Place of Social Solidarity and Dialogue

The welfare state in the UK presents immigrant communities with a set of institutions, which are potentially new and unknown. What is the best way to ensure that the questions of access to the welfare institutions are best managed? Trusting, understanding and feeling solidarity with the welfare state will obviously help with this problem. In order to shed light on this phenomenon, this paper presents a qualitative exploratory study dealing with elements of solidarity as perceived by members of the South Asian Community in the UK. Six indepth interviews with South Asian first generation immigrants who had never experienced mental health problems were conducted. They were asked questions about who their support networks would be in the event of them experiencing mental health problems. The thematic analysis of the interviews suggests that the respondents believed that solidarity and support ties are found to be present in families, within the south Asian community and also with welfare institutions. It is concluded that there although things are far from perfect, assimilation and integration based on dialogue is an observable positive aspect of mental health service provision in the UK.

Neighbourhoods Mobilise the Troops - Community Organising, Violence and Governmentality

The article reflects on the difficult relation between community work against domestic violence and local crime prevention under the conditions of the neoliberal state that cuts down on social benefits and promotes self-help, active citizenship and self-responsibility instead while at the same time restoring the punishing state with its strict regime of law-and-order. The author describes a project Tarantula - she started herself while being a social worker in Hamburg, Germany. Tarantula was aimed at strengthening social networks and the neighbours' willingness to get involved in favour of affected women. Although conceptualized as an emancipatory approach referring to community organizing in the tradition of social movements it is questionable whether and how this can really work in the current situation. At present, the field of crime control is being reconfigured as a result of political and administrative decisions, which, for their part, are based on a new structure of social relations and cultural attitudes. The demolition of the 'welfare state' means the re-coding of the security policy that facilitates the development of interventionist techniques that govern and control individuals through their own ability to act.

Quality Management and Formalization in Social Service Organizations - A Survey on Home-Based Family Intervention Services

Although the effects of quality management on social work are still widely unexplored, critics suspect that it will lead to a negative standardization of working conditions, whereas supporters of quality management hope for a greater transparency and effectiveness of service delivery. This article reports on a survey of 30 managers, 261 professionals, and 435 families in 30 family intervention service organizations. It uses cluster analysis to explore the relationship between quality management and different forms of work formalization. Results showed that working conditions generally are enabling for professional practice, but differences exist between what is called here a managerialist machine bureaucracy, an atomistic professional organization, and a collegiate professional organization.

Social services in accession countries

The 1st May 2004 10 new countries joined the European Union. It is one of the most impor-tant events in the history of the European Union and all of Europe. New nations are accessing the Community and so new challenges are emerging. An important challenge is the exchange of information in order to better understand each other. This article aims to outline informa-tion on the social services in selected accession countries - Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary (hereinafter "Visegrad countries").