”Vi snackar aldrig skit” – Hur socionomer hanterar den stress de upplever i sin arbetsvardag

Sammanfattning: The aim of this paper was to examine how social workers in the field of substance abuse describe their backstage coping strategies and how these are used to cope with the stress they experience in their every day work. The paper has drawn its empirical material from four semi-structured interviews with social workers that work in an institution for care under the Care of Abusers Act (Swedish). Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis and coping theory were used as theoretical approaches to analyze the data from the interviews. Through the interviews, two significant kinds of coping in the backstage area were found. One is referred to as coping with co-workers. This consists of peer-to-peer conversations, meetings and informal conversations among co-workers. Humor is stressed as a special kind of communal coping, which enabled the social workers to reduce anxiety levels within the work group and deal with stressful situations in a socially acceptable way. The other backstage coping is referred to as an internalized backstage, where the interviewees coped with stress through reflection, analysis and different coping strategies. Furthermore it is argued that the four social workers categorized their clients in different ways in the interviews. That categorization was analyzed as a form of power demonstration and coping mechanism in one. It was concluded that the frontstage and backstage roles of the social workers are very different and that the frontstage expectations are very high and demanding, creating a need for a backstage environment where the social workers can cope with stress, relax from the high frontstage demands and strategize in preparation of their frontstage performances.