En hälsosam arbetsplats? - En kvalitativ studie av socialsekreterares upplevelser av arbetsrelaterad stress i offentlig förvaltning

This study uses qualitative research by documenting experiences of social workers work-related stress in a governmental organization. The aim of this research is to investigate how social workers experience sense of coherence and how that relates to stress in their work-place. Both of these will hopefully allow for a clearer picture regarding what factors can help create a healthy workplace. Semi-structured interviews were used to capture the social workers subjective perspectives and a total of nine different interviews were performed; using both men and women of different ages. The social workers who participated in this study were all educated and currently working for a governmental organization in Helsingborg. For the analysis of our data, we used Aaron Antonovskys (2005) theory of sense of coherence and also, previous research of risk and protective factors. Our findings showed that social workers experience work-related stress when they lose their feeling of control and the pressure reaches an unmanageable level. Sense of coherence plays an important role that influences the amount of work-related stress. A high sense of coherence can protect social workers from being negatively affected by stress related to their work. Our focus was to look at the influence the psychosocial work-place environment has on social workers experiences of stress and we have found that the physical environment also has a strong impact on work-related stress