Digitalisering över en natt: En Studie om skolkuratorers upplevelser under coronapandemin

Sammanfattning: The digitalization of social work in Sweden has skyrocketed in the 21st century. New challenges are rising for social workers as well as social service users. The aim of this study was to explore school counselors' experiences conducting their counseling sessions online. This to find out what hardships they have encountered and how they dealt with them. The aim of this study was to contact gymnasium school counselors all hailing from the same municipality to collect their experiences regarding their experiences with digital social work due to COVID-19. We chose to focus on gymnasium school counselors because those schools transitioned to an online workplace. The study is based upon semi-structured telephone interviews with school counselors from a large municipality in Sweden. All our interviewed counselors had experienced some issues with adapting to the new digital medium. Our interviewees had tried different kinds of strategies to improve their relationships and host successful counselling sessions with students, all with varying degrees of success. The conclusion to our study showed that gymnasium school counselors had experienced issues with the digital approach to their work as well as a lack in education for online counselling. Many of them had concerns with secrecy towards their students and how they were supposed to create healthy relationships over the digital medium. They also addressed concerns regarding the effectiveness of online counselling and expressed that transitioning to an online work environment was a challenge. The online counselling sessions had in comparison to face-to-face a strong focus on solving the student’s practical issues. The counselors also heavily embraced a supportive approach for the counseling sessions with students as an adaptation to the online environment. The school counselors saw opportunities in using online counselling to access hard to reach students, such as those who felt pressure to keep up appearances. Even though they saw the good digital social work could bring to their professions most of our interviewed curators advocated that physical face-to-face interaction was superior to online curative work.