Abstract
This thesis takes it’s point of departure in a practice research project to answer the problem statement: How can young users contribute with knowledge that can help strengthen the discipline of involvement in practice, and how will this knowledge impact the social workers’ reflection on own involvement practices?
The aim of the thesis is to contribute with a social professional discussion of how a user perspective can contribute with knowledge to the practice and research of young people, who has special needs, within the social work.
The thesis builds on a methodological triangulation that consists of:
• Five observations of meetings between young users and their social workers
• Three interviews with young users with the aim of investigating their experiences of being in involved in their own cases
• Three interviews with social workers with focus on investigating how they understand and convert involvement into practice
The thesis exemplifies that involvement in the social science government work is a complex field. The involvement of young users appears to take place at a low level in the involvement ladder, where the young are not invited into the cooperation with the social worker. The involvement itself seems unclear and unstructured when support of involvement is lacking. Thus, the role of the young appears reduced to providing information to the social worker about his/her own situation.
The young users’ experiences of being involved indicate a certain shift from non-involvement to involvement the older they get. Their stories indicate that involvement previously and in part still takes place at a very low level, where they are not understood based on their own understanding of problems.
Throughout the thesis, I seek to make the social workers reflect on their own involvement practices in order to strengthen and qualify the general involvement in practice. During this phase, several relevant reflections come up that will be able to increase the possibilities for involving the young in their own cases. However, this phase also indicates that the social workers are challenged by their own understanding of the concept of involvement, as they tend to avert facts by emphasising how they do involve the young. It seems difficult for them to acknowledge the reflections that arises about their own involvement practices.
The thesis shows a significant potential for the application of user perspectives in practice and research alike. The user perspective can provide new perspectives of knowledge that the fields of practice and research struggle to access otherwise. This, however, implies that the user perspective is recognised as a relevant field of knowledge. And there is a need for a longer course of reflecting on learnings in order to enable social workers to become more aware of their own practice of involvement.