Maskrosen bröt sig väg ändå : En studie av copingstrategier och skyddsfaktorer hos bloggare som skriver om en svår barndom

Sammanfattning: As a social worker you often meet children that are exposed to harmful environments in one way or another. Children who grow up in these circumstances could easily be forgotten, there-fore it is vital that these children are brought to attention. In these situations it´s necessary to find which positiv measures would be benefitial for these children. The internet is an expan-sive resource due to the increase of bloggs, which is the latest form of interaction possibility in the information society. Therefore we realise that as proffessionals, it is imperative to be kept updated and follow the progress, in order to help their clients better.With a base of different blog materials, the purpose of the thesis was to investigate how we could discern any protective factors and coping strategies through the life stories told by the bloggers. Our ques-tions that were built upon the purpose were: What kind of risk factors and protective factors is there in the blogs written by people with a difficult childhood? And, what emotional and problem oriented coping strategies does the bloggers use? To answer our questions and fulfil the purpose of the thesis we have used the method of qua-litative content analysis where we used bloggers writing about their tough childhood. We used coding in the analysis with three categories included: Risk factors, protective factors and normalization. The result was, with a base of different blogs writing about their tough child-hoods, that the risk factors were plenty in these specific blogs. However, we could also dis-cern the protective factors. The overall protective factors were the individual strengths such as coping, self-control and independent thinking. These protective factors have promoted a resis-tance within the bloggers that we have investigated. Furthermore, it is shown that due to the protection factors the bloggers were able to coop with the stressful situations they were put through their childhood more easily. We found that coping strategies were used by all the people writing about their difficulties growing up in their blogs. Some used one coping strate-gy whilst others used several. Although the most used strategies were the emotional coping strategis.