Collaboration in the specialized social welfare : – A qualitative study about collaboration between social workers that works with financial aid or substance abuse.

The purpose with this study is to examine how social workers collaborate with clients that have both financial aid and substance abuse problems. The study aimed to examine if the social workers experienced that there were limits in their work when collaboration takes place. The study is based on eight semi-structured interviews with social workers from four different municipalities in Sweden. Criteria for the social workers were whether they should work with financial aid or addiction treatment. The interviews were analyzed with former research and theoretical concept discretion. The results of the study show that collaboration in social service is different depending on errand. Often it happens with information exchange. The result of the study also shows that social workers' work is affected by collaboration. Sometimes it supports their own work and sometimes it can create obstacles in their own work. One part of the result is that the nearness is an important component for functioning collaboration and the geographical nearness and distance affects the social worker’s work. That creates questions if the digital world can be helpful for collaboration in social service