Familjevård, Kultur och Etnicitet: rekryteringsprocessen ur ett kulturellt och etniskt perspektiv

Sammanfattning: Children are said to be the future of our society. Hence, how we take care of our children is a cause of concern. This is evident in much of the social work that is carried out in Sweden. One of the times when we find children to be the most vulnerable is when they, for different reasons, are separated from their biological families and placed in foster care. Based on the fact that Sweden over the last century has experienced an increased immigration intake we wanted to take a closer look on how this change of the population dynamics has influenced foster care in the country. Our aim with this paper is to investigate how social workers concerned with recruiting foster families for children look upon culture and ethnicity as a determinatory factor of where and with whom to place a specific child. Due to the limitations of this paper we have based our study on one city only, Malmö. Wanting to find out in depth how social workers reasoned we chose a qualitative method, and more specifically semistructured interviews. The empirical material of the study was based on interviews with nine social workers from eight different districts in the chosen city. Theories used to analyse the collected empirical material are system theory and ecological development theory. Our research concluded that despite changes in society, the social workers saw no major changes in their work. They consider cultural and ethnical heritage to be an important aspect of the recruitment process in foster care, but only one of many to be considered. Nevertheless they all admit lacking cultural knowledge.