Socionomstudenten - individen och utbildningsvalet

Sammanfattning: Our study aims to get a greater understanding of why students choose a social work education and why the education is so popular despite the social service’s negative reputation. We also aim to get an understanding of the student's intended career paths. We used Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic approach to the study so that we could use our own interpretations of why students made their choices based on the following theoretical concepts; Richard Ryan and Edward Deci's Self-determination theory, Pierre Bourdieu's habitus, and capital as well as Gadamer's hermeneutic circle. We conducted the study through a semi-constructed interview. By using a targeted selection we focused on social work students within the first four semesters hoping their thoughts and goals weren’t influenced by the internship that occurs in semester five. The results showed that students often had an altruistic motive for applying to a social work education program. However, it was not uncommon for the students to also have a higher career motive. The study also showed that the width of work possibilities was a crucial factor in applying despite the negative reputation of social service. Students reported that social services were not the field they aspired to work in, however, they all agreed that it was a good place to start to get experience. We could also see that there was a connection between growing up in social vulnerability and applying to social work education.