Stöd eller tillrättavisning : En kvantitativ studie om socialarbetares attityder till ekonomisk rådgivning som metod

Sammanfattning: The aim of this bachelor thesis was to examine attitudes among social workers, particularly their attitudes toward their clients’ poverty and towards economic counseling as a method. A further aim was to study the relationship between attitudes towards poverty and economic counseling. Primary data used for the study was assembled among social workers (n = 111) with the use of an electronic questionnaire that was sent out to social welfare offices in 34 city districts in Stockholm,Gothenburg and Malmö. The findings showed that a majority of the social workers had a structural understanding of poverty and a positive attitude towards economic counseling. No correlations were found between the attitudes towards poverty and towards economic counseling. Although economic counseling can be seen as a method for individual change, the social workers had a positive attitude towards using it with clients’ whose inability to support themselves was interpreted as structurally implied. This was understood as a means to minimize the negative effects of poverty and as a way to go beyond administrative tasks. Through Giddens duality of structure theory, economic counseling was interpreted as a way of affecting the structurally caused problem of poverty by changing the actions of the client.