Lyssna på mig! : En kvalitativ studie om brukarinflytande för vuxna missbrukare

The aim of our study is to deepen our understanding of how both social workers and clients describe how user influence within substance abuse care for adults can work. What difficul-ties do they describe meeting, with regards to possibilities to influence the care? To achieve our purpose we had a qualitative approach for this study. It’s based on open thematic inter-views with 3 clients who have substance abuse problems, and with 3 social workers, working at Social Services in Stockholm. Our theoretical perspectives used to analyze the empirical data are democracy, paternalism and empowerment. Our results show that the client’s possi-bilities of user influence are limited, due to the very strict financial budget that they have. We also found that interpersonal relationships between user and social worker have a great impact on how the clients experience their possibilities of user influence. Another result showed that social workers often had a paternalistic view, which is something that comes from wanting to do good for their clients. Even so, paternalism decreases possibilities of user influence