En diskursanalys av socialsekreterarnas målformuleringar inom familj- och individomsorgen

Sammanfattning: The social services open care services have expanded significantly since the social service law came into force in 1982, and there has been a great demand for evaluations of its efforts ever since. In practice, however, there have been difficulties in evaluations that use the social service documentation as a basis. The lack of uniform terminology is a factor that has been highlighted regarding the difficulties in the evaluations. Contradictory influences such as NPM, EBP and the intention with the social service law have affected the organization of public sector activities, and the social worker's occupation is confined within this organizational form. It has been of interest to study the professional practice at the discursive level to see if the influences that have affected its organization can be found among the discourses of social workers. The purpose of the thesis has been to use Fairclough's critical discourse analysis as method and theory to analyze the formulations of social workers in the assignment documents to shed further light on the difficulties in evaluations. The thesis's empirical data consists of 88 assignment documents from 2019 which are sent from the social secretary in the child section after investigations / applications to therapists within the open care. The wording in the assignment documents consists of goals that the open care practitioners must achieve. The result shows that the market and EBP discourse that is required, in order to use the documents as a basis for evaluations, is missing. Instead, the formulations consist of both a moral and an ambivalent discourse and these order of discourses reproduce conditions that do not allow evaluations of efforts. Thus, it is advocated to exclude the social service documentation when evaluating and instead find other more suitable methods.