Staten och socionomen. En kvantitativ studie av social bakgrund och välfärdspolitiska attitydmönster bland blivande socialarbetare

The North-American sociologist Michael Lipsky has characterized social workers as street-level bureaucrats with a substantial discretion in the relationship between the welfare state and its citizens. Within Lipsky´s theoretical framework social workers appear as a powerful group that socializes the citizens to uphold certain expectations towards the welfare state and its (re)distributional programs. From this point of view, it is important to learn more about social workers and the attitudes they express towards the welfare state. The aim of this study is to analyze how the welfare-political attitudes of future social workers are affected by their social background (e.g. class background and ancestral homeland). The study positions itself within class theory, but also includes other social science perspectives covering social stratification and interest formation. The data material was collected through a survey based on a sample of 145 social work students at a Swedish university and analyzed with a binary logistic regression model. Although the study shows an absence of broad statistical correlations between the social background variables and the welfare-political attitudes, it also shows that class background, age and party-political preferences are factors that have a statistically significant impact on some of the welfare-political attitude indicators