Combining fulltime studies with work : Consequences of legitimacy and the rule of law

This study aims to examine how students who are studying social work are experiencing the combination of full time studies and a part-time job in a human service organization. Furthermore, the aim of this study is also to examine how these students consider legitimacy and the rule of law in relation to their part-time job. To answer this study, we put the focus on students who are studying their sixth or seventh semester in social work at Linnaeus University in Sweden where some students are combining full time studies with a part-time job in a human service organization. In total, nine students with this combination where interviewed in this study, all with different part-time jobs. The outcomes of this study show that students who are studying social work and working part-time are working for different reasons. Some of them say that they work for extra money, and some of them would like to get work experience. The students in this study think that this combination goes well and that they can relate practice from work into their theory in school and vise versa. Some of the students in this study have not thought about legitimacy in relation to their work, which we think is interesting. However, all of the students had thought about the rule of law in relation to their work. What is interesting to us is that we also learned that the students think that they can implement good work even though they have not thought about legitimacy that much