Socialt arbete på fyra ben: En kvalitativ studie över hur djurunderstött socialt arbete kan användas inom verksamhetsområdena LSS samt äldreomsorg

• Main Authors: Persson, Pernilla, Nilsson, Linnea
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för hälsa och samhälle (HS) 2019
• Subjects: Animal-assisted; social work; functionally impaired; elderly care; Social Sciences; Samhällsvetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-26354

The purpose of this paper is to examine in which ways animal-assisted work can be used within elderly care and with people that are included in support and service for persons with certain functional impairments (in Sweden called LSS). Through qualitative, semi-structured interviews we wanted to see what kind of experiences the professionals had and if there are any advantages and disadvantages with this type of work. Our selection consisted of six people from various institutions that practice social work in the south of Sweden, equally divided between LSS and elderly care, who together with five dogs and one horse implement animal-assisted social work in their institutions. Six different themes were identified in the empirical data we gathered throughout our interviews. With the help from our themes, previous research on the subject and our theories the biophilia hypothesis, SOC and symbolic interactionism we managed to analyse our empirical data. To sum up, our result indicates that the animal-assisted work gives very positive results for the clients. We have been given examples on how the animal-assisted social work helps breaking the client’s isolation, how it can contribute to an increased well-being physically as well as mentally. We have also seen how the animals can be used to work as a motivational factor and how they can teach the clients accountability. Furthermore, we discuss our results and future research we are interested in seeing to ease the animal-assisted social work progress in the Swedish social work.