ALLA OLIKA ALLA LIKA - En problematiserande studie av ASI utifrån socialsekreterares perspektiv

All different, All equal -a study on ASI from social workers perspective The use of standardized assessment instruments in social work has increased rapidly in recent years in Sweden. The focus of the scientific research concerning these instruments has been on the deficiencies in the instrument itself, rather than the use of the instrument per se. Therefore this paper highlights the use of standardized assessment instruments in social work practice and whether it guaranties a larger equality in the assessments by the social workers that is favourable to the client. We chose to focus on the standardized assessment instrument Addiction Severity Index and the use of this in social services. We interviewed ten randomly selected social workers from seven different social services with experiences of working with ASI. The analysis of these interviews is based on Lipskys (2010) theory on Street-level bureaucracies and theory on accounts (Scott&Lyman, 1968). In our results we found that a majority of the social workers had a positive attitude towards working with ASI. We found that social workers supplemented the ASI-questionnaire with questions they thought were missing. In addition to this there was a difference among the social workers attitude to the client’s possibility to decline participation in the ASI-interview. As a result a possible conclusion of our findings is that the social workers base their assessments on individual types of data, which may be considered contradictory to one of the purposes with standardized assessment instruments