”Tiden räcker inte till” - en kvalitativ studie om socialsekreterares arbete med barns delaktighet inom barnavårdsutredningar

Sammanfattning: Sweden is often seen as a pioneer when it comes to children’s rights. Despite this, there is a lack of children's participation in issues that affects them. The aim of this study is to explore how social workers in the Swedish social services enable children’s participation in assessments and which factors that can affect this. The study has used a qualitative method with semi-structured interviews with six social workers. The interviews have been analyzed by using Shier’s pathways to participation model and Lipsky ́s theory of street level bureaucrats. The result shows that social workers enable children's participation by using different methods and tools, the two most common being BBIC and Signs of Safety. Factors that can affect the work with children’s participation are implementation of different methods into the organisation which have a positive effect and a lack of time due to a high workload which have a negative effect. The conclusion of this study is that the social workers have a lot of methods and tools to enable children’s participation but that factors like lack of time due to a high workload makes it impossible for the social workers to enable children’s participation in the way that they should.