"...support must also sometimes include control!" A qualitative study regarding social service workers view of the secondary housing market

The aim of this study was to examine the view of social service workers on the secondary housing market based upon their work with social investigations regarding people with a difficult substance abuse. The foundation of this study rests upon a phenomenon, which according to other scholars, occurs in the secondary housing market in Sweden. The secondary housing market consists of a multitude of housing projects that social services provide for people who are homeless. The phenomenon is that the secondary housing market contains a number of demands aimed at the clients who live in these housing projects. If a client fails to live up to the demands it can sometimes lead to negative consequences which results in an exclusion from the housing projects. This can in turn lead to a worsening sub-stance abuse, contradictive to the aim of the investigating social service workers. In this study we have by using qualitative methods conducted interviews with five social service workers in the city of Malmo, Sweden. The analysis was based upon two different theories: symbolic interactionism and an organizational theory. Our primary conclusions in this study are that the social service workers apply a meaning to themselves as; part support-givers towards their clients and part guar-antee-givers towards the landlords of the Swedish housing market. Another find-ing was that people who experience the most difficult situations, often a multitude of social problems, are the ones who are excluded from the secondary housing market, the very market which purpose it is to provide housing for people that are excluded from the ordinary Swedish housing market