Social Worker in Children's Home

This thesis focuses on the activities of a social worker in a children´s home. Its objective is to provide insight into the work of a social worker in a children´s home, describe the challenges and experiences encountered in the practice of social work. A social worker is an essential part of every children´s home. His responsibilities mainly involve the administrative aspects of admitting, accommodating, and departure of a child. In the practical part of the thesis a qualitative research strategy was utilized to fulfill the set objective, using specific methods such as questioning and semi-structured interview technique. Through semi-structured interview, answers to a total of 12 questions were gathered, which helped to clarify the objectives and research questions of the thesis. The research sample consisted of social workers from children´s homes. The gathered data was analyzed using open coding and subsequently grouped into categories. The results shown that the work of a social worker in a children´s home is primarily administrative in nature, and they only come into contact with the children in specific situations. The experiences of social workers vary in some cases, but they generally agree on the difficulties they face. One of the difficulties lies in facilitating contact between parents and child. For social workers in children´s homes, it is demanding to locate and contact parents. The problem is frequent changes in residence addresses or phone numbers. Another issue with parents is situation when they make numerous promises to their children but fail to fulfill them in the end. They lack essential information about the birth of the child, childhood, sometimes even about their health condition and relatives. The departure of a child from the home is also demanding for the workers. The workers have information about some children or the children themselves come to visit the children´s home, Unfortunately, regarding some of the children, the workers have no information, which troubles them