How social workers assess sexual addiction among adolescents

This research seeks to unravel the definition of sexual addiction amongst adolescents from the perspectives of professional social workers, working with these types of issues. This has been conducted through a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews with social workers in various youth clinics in Stockholm. The results gathered from the interviews are presented and then analyzed through discourse analysis using the social constructionism as our theoretical framework. The primary results gathered, conclude that sexual addiction amongst adolescents is to be defined within the personal contact between the client and the social worker in order to build an individual case discourse. The results also depicts that shame and anxiety are the driving forces for the phenomenon. Furthermore, inconsistency was discovered regarding the terminology of the phenomenon amongst the social workers. It is important to note that the adolescent years are time of rapid change and, thus, the behavior resembling sexual addiction may not be permanent. The results are then discussed and compared to previous research