Prussiluskan - En diskursanalys om socionomstudenters syn på socionomyrket

Sammanfattning: Abstract Author: Amanda Rask & Mariaserena Baretta Title: Prussiluskan - en diskursanalys om socionomstudenters syn på socionomyrket Supervisor: Mikael Sandgren Assessor: Maria Bangura Arvidsson The aim of this study was to examine how social work students speak of social work, and what knowledge they consider necessary for a social worker. Our main question to analyze was however how the students described the profession to see how they related to the dominant discourse. The method used for analysis was qualitative. We based our study on six semi structured interviews with social work students from Lund University. In the interviews we mainly asked questions about their background, why they sought the education to be a social worker and their view of the education, and how they experienced the society’s view on social workers and the overall attitude against social work. Our theoretical starting point was social constructionism and Foucault´s theory of power and discipline. We used a critical discourse analysis based on normalization to be able to analyze words that the students used in the interviews. In conclusion, we have discovered two discourses, one which we named the traditional dominant discourse, and one got the name contradictory untraditional discourse. We found however two positions within the normal discourse: street level and macro position. This shows that students think that social workers can work on different society levels. Thus, we were able to find that the majority of students took stand from the traditional social work with a will to help and support exposed people in the society, but found also a contradictory way of thinking. The dominant normal discourse was yet traditional since the students had a traditional mind-set in terms of social work, which has its stand in the historical social work. Key words: social work, traditional discourse, critical discourse analysis, normalization, students.