Spindeln i nätet : En kvalitativ studie om skolkuratorers möjligheter och hinder i arbetet kring elever som har föräldrar med alkohol- eller annat drogmissbruk.

• Main Authors: Jakobsson, Malin, Larsson Åström, Nina
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för socialt arbete, SA 2012
• Subjects: School social workers; students with parents who abuse alcohol or other drugs; room for action; street level bureaucracy; theory of recognition.; Skolkurator; elever med föräldrar som missbrukar alkohol eller andra droger; handlingsutrymme; gräsrotsbyråkrati; erkännande
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-17062

The aim of this essay was to describe how school social workers can help and support students with parents who abuse alcohol or other drugs. We wanted to see how school social workers room for action is presented and how it affects their work with students living with parents who are abusing. We used a qualitative method to elucidate how school social workers handle this issue in a more profound way. By conducting semistructured interviews with six school social workers in one province in southern Sweden we gained exhaustive and detailed answers. In the analysis we used street level bureaucracy and theory of recognition. The result showed that the school social workers regard their overarching room of action as very wide inside school but limited outside. At school the school social worker can support the students with supportive counseling and adapted school attendance. One important task of the school social worker is to help the student to get in contact with other organizations for example, support groups for children. We also found that cooperation is an important part as the school social workers describe themselves as “the spider in the web” with the task of connecting and sharing knowledge with other personnel and organizations. The relation with the student is important to be able to support the students or guide them further. School social workers also regard school as a good place to detect and identify these students, but that it can be difficult to know who these students are. If a specific plan for working with students whose parents abuse alcohol or drugs would affect the school social workers work is difficult to say since none that we interviewed in this study had experience of one.