Det komplexa samtalet - En kvalitativ studie om utredande socialsekreterares upplevelser av barnsamtal

Sammanfattning: The aim of this paper was to examine and illustrate what experiences investigating social workers may have from interviewing children in social investigations concerning child welfare. Through semi-structured interviews with six professionally active investigating social workers in different municipalities in southern Sweden we focused on their own experiences, thoughts, feelings and commentary on how they perceive interviewing children. In particular we have examined four major themes; methods, difficulties, perceptions of security and child ́s best/ child ́s wishes. The analysis was based on the theory and perspective of the knowledgebase of social workers where we included the terms: general- and real competence, object knowledge, procedure knowledge, client knowledge as well as meta knowledge. We then identified witch type of knowledge or competence the social workers make use of, does not use to their full potential or would like to have more of in relative to our four themes. All of the interviewed social workers do see difficulties with interviewing children in social investigations concerning the child ́s welfare, both professional and emotional with often occurring dilemmas between the child ́s best and the child ́s wishes and sometimes unexpected information about a maltreated child. What we found was also that the social workers with longer work experience have developed more real competence and meta knowledge which makes them see less difficulties within their own abilities, influencing on their choice of methods and their perspective of security whilst interviewing children.