Handläggning med barnets bästa i fokus : En kvalitativ studie om LSS-handläggares handlingsutrymme i arbetet med personlig assistans för barn

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to understand how five social workers use their discretion the work with "best interests of the child" in investigations concerning personal assistance and thus contribute knowledge about the latitude in relation to the government's legal examination of personal support for children. The study aims to answer questions of how social workers interpret the term “best interest of the child” in relation to the children who are being investigated for the need of personal assistance, how do social workers think about "Personal support for children" based on the child's best interests and what possible risks and opportunities can social workers identify in “Personal support for children” based on their discretion? The study is based on qualitative interviews with five social workers from four municipalities who work with investigations of children with disabilities. The theoretical framework of the study consists the Street level bureaucracy and Bronfenbrenner´s bioecological model with focus on micro and mesosystem. The result of the study was that the social workers found it hard to relate to “the best interest of the child” because of the lack of communication with the children with special needs and unclear directions in their line of work. The social workers had a positive attitude to the LSS-investigations proposal on changing from personal assistance to “Personal support to children” both from the child and their perspective, but there were also questions about how it could be implemented in practice and raised the differences in assessment depending on politics and the municipality.  My conclusion is first of all that the social workers want to have more tools and knowledge about kids with special needs to be able to implement the best interest of the child for those children who don’t have the capability of communicate. And second that social work is a complex work where the discretion of social workers are unclear.