Socialsekreterares kunskap om och anvädning av sociala medier i arbetet : En studie i en medelstor kommun i södra Sverige

Abstract The aim off this study is to research social workers´ knowledge, use, risks and possibilities of social media in their work with clients. Because today the society is using social media networks in daily life and social media has become a tool in social work as well. How does social media and social work cooperate? And how does social media effect social workers? For example the website Facebook has grown huge and many people use it everyday. Where is the line between work and private life? To reach this knowledge in this study, qualitative interviews have been done with six social workers that work with children, youths and families. The scientific theory is a phenomenologist approach and for the analyse I used Robert Putnam´s theory of social capital and Antonowsky´s theory about KASAM (sense of coherence). The results of this study showed that the social workers experience that social media in social work has both good and less good sides. I found that their knowledge were quite different and seemed to depend on how much they had used social media earlier. The use of social media in the work with clients was the use of email and text messages. Although, some of the social workers had experienced that clients had found them on the network Facebook. The risks and possibilities the social workers thought that they and the clients could see were the risk in the secrecy and the possibilities to reach more people. The most interesting conclusion was that, even if they didn’t use social media in work, some of them felt that they were indirectly effected by social media and that they sometimes didn’t know how to cope with social medias in their work