Digitaliserat klientmöte - Socialarbetares syn på digitala möten med klienten

Sammanfattning: This is a qualitative study; whose purpose is to illuminate the experiences of the social workers within the digital client meetings. Our interviewees consisted of four probation inspectors from the probation service and three social secretaries from the social services, all within the investigation unit. The participation of the interviewees has contributed to knowledge within the research area. We analyzed the results with the help of former research, theories from the domain theory, the dramaturgical perspective and the conception of communication. The implementation of digital client meetings took off in 2020, as a result of the prevailing pandemic. The results indicate that the transition between the physical to the digital client meetings was met with resistance from the coworkers in both the probation and in the social services. Though, it has been stated that there is a future vision among the social workers to keep working with digital client meetings, given that it gets combined with physical meetings. The interviewees suppose that it is up to the social workers themselves to decide what meetings should be physical or digital. It emerges from this study’s results that there is a concern regarding the meetings with the clients and that the meetings become digital. Social workers witness that there is no way to get a fair perception of the client digitally. Further, they stress that fully digitalized client meetings will lead to social workers not being able to execute their tasks adequately. Social workers consider that it is difficult to hold a conversation with a client digitally and expect to fulfill the same quality as in a real-life conversation. In conclusion, it has become apparent that lack of communication affects client meetings negatively. Likewise, the study has shown that social workers’ senses that digitalized client meetings are effective and timesaving because of the easier way of getting in contact with their clients.