Barnperspektivet inom ekonomiskt bistånd : En intervjustudie om socialsekreterares upplevelser av barnperspektivet i handläggningen av ekonomiskt bistånd

The following study aims to study how social workers in the processing of social assistance relate to child perspective after the incorporation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It has been also examined how organizational guidelines and rules affect the processing of social assistance. This study has a qualitative research approach, and the empirical data has been collected through five interviews with social workers, who are working with social assistance in two different municipalities in Sweden. The empirical material has been analyzed through Michael Lipsky´s theory of street-level bureaucrats and discretion. All the social workers in this study consider that taking into consideration to child’s perspective is very important in the processing of social assistance but it is somehow ambiguous and complex. As a result, sometimes the social workers do not have the opportunity to consider child perspectives, even though there is now a law stipulated after the incorporation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child into Swedish law. Some of these factors that make the work difficult for social workers in the processing of social assistance are lack of time, rules and laws, indistinct organizational guidelines, etcetera. The results of this study also show that the social workers do not want to talk to or meet the children during the processing of social assistance and the working process can differ between the municipalities, where one municipality has much more difficulty in considering child perspectives due to too much workload and lack of time