Barnperspektivet inom ekonomiskt bistånd - En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av skånska riktlinjer

Sammanfattning: The aim of this paper was to study the municipal guidelines that socialworkers use in their judicial decision-making regarding clients right to welfare in relation to national recommendations of how a child perspective should be considered in all decision-making that concerns children. The study consists of 9 Scanian municipal guidelines that have been studied via the method of qualitative content analysis. The research questions of this study were as follows: • How are a child perspective defined and motivated in the municipal guidelines regarding welfare? • Which similarities and differencies can be seen in the municipal guidelines? • Which institutional logics can be seen in the municipal guidelines? • In what way does the organizational boundaries the municipal guidelines designates affect the discretion of the case worker? Studied via organizational theories regarding competative institutional logics and the social workers position as a street level bureaucrat with the discretion that follows, the municipal guidelines have been found to contain several different institutional logics that affects the socialworkers discretion and decision-making regarding keeping a child perspective. The insitutional logics that been identified are concerning support versus self-support as well as equal treatment versus individual needs assessment. The municipal guidelines are designed in a manner that promotes the socialworkers discretion in some ways and circumscribe them in others. The study found that the guidelines rarely defines how the case worker is supposed to work with a child perspective and that there are significant differencies among the guidelines regarding mentioning of child perspective and childrens needs wich makes it adequate to question the legal certainty concerning children.