Sin egen lyckas smed... :en kvalitativ studie om socialarbetares drivkraft för att stanna kvar i yrket

The purpose of our paper was to understand the motivators that kept the social workers within the profession. Social workers' have a profession that, to the greatest extent, means high working load and difficult problematic issues. On the basis of this starting point we asked us why so many social workers still choose to remain within the profession for several years. The purpose of our paper is to understand what motivates the social workers to stay within their profession. To understand which are the motivators, we decided to use the theory salutogeent perspective with Aaron Antonvsky's sense of coherence. We also looked on our result from a gender point of view. We performed 10 qualitative interviews on social workers. The respondents' sense of coherence was analysed through a standardised life questionnaire. Our results showed us that the most important motivators, among our respondents, were personal development, the contact with their clients and the will to help the client to change on an individual level. We found a slight difference between the genders. The men were to a greater extent focusing on the will to help the client to change on an individual level than the women. Women were more focusing on the relation with their colleagues. We also found that the persons that have stayed longest within the profession had high Sense Of Coherence. The women also had a higher Sense Of Coherence than the men