Insatsen kontaktperson för ungdomar mellan 13-18 år : en rättssociologisk studie

The purpose of this essay was to study which arguments social workers used in the basis of their estimation concerning young people of the age 13-18 given an aid, a contact person (swe. kontaktperson). The purpose was also to describe how the legal paragraph, regarding contact person, is regulated and then compare the arguments made by the social worker with the intentions expressed by the legislator. To answer our purposes we studied the law and the intentions expressed by the legislator, which is the foundation for the legal paragraph that regulates contact person, 3 chap. 6 §. Through studies of social journals at five local authorities we collected material to make a comparison between the arguments found in the journals with the intentions expressed by the legislator. We used legal method and the perspective of sociology of law. The Swedish law, Socialtjänstlagen (2001:453) is a basic law which means that our legal paragraph, 3 chap 6 §, is open for interpretation. It is every local authority's own option how to apply the paragraph. The results showed that the social workers do use the same terms as the legislator. Our results also showed that the social workers to a great extent used arguments that could not be traced to the intentions expressed by the legislator. The essay is a quantitative study. Our data has been processed through a program for statistical analysis, SPSS, version 14.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences)