Vårdnadsöverflyttningar av familjehemsplacerade barn och ungdomar : En kvalitativ studie utifrån socialsekreterares upplevelser av vårdnadsöverflyttningar

Sammanfattning: When a child has been in foster care for three years, the Municipal Welfare Committee has to, according to Swedish legislation, evaluate whether or not to transfer the custody of the child to the foster family. Foster families are accepting children with severe physical and mental trauma into their homes, giving them everyday care, and raising and guiding them on their journey to adulthood. Still, the number of transferred custodies is small in comparison to the number of children in foster care. We are asking ourselves why this is the case. Unlike other studies on the subject, we have chosen to approach the matter from the perspective of case workers within the Social Services who, by law, are obligated to instigate the transfer of custody after three years. The aim of this thesis is to, through an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of a series of semi-structured deep interviews with social workers and their supervisors, investigate which organizational and emotional parameters in the responsible case worker’s everyday reality might be affecting the low number of instigated transfers of custody among children in Swedish foster care. The result shows five emerging themes among our respondents – Organization, Time, Responsibility, Information and Conflict. These five factors are impacting one other, but also the case worker. Discussed against a background of Organizational theory and the Front-line bureaucrat’s level of discretion, we aim to let the case workers’ relation to these five emerging themes put the matter of the low number of transferred custodies into a new light.