This thesis examines Herning Municipality’s Children- and Family Counseling, as this municipality is considered to improve practice with their implementation of Sverigesprogrammet (ed. the Swedish Program), for this reason Children- and Family Counseling in Herning is considered particularly successful. The Swedish program establishes more favorable working conditions for social workers due to the handling of fewer cases, closer follow-ups and therefore a better opportunity to form a holistic approach to the families’ situation. This holistic approach includes examination of the families’ finances which is considered essential as it is shown in reports that parents’ financial situation has a major impact on children's well-being and development.
Child poverty is currently part of social policy in Denmark with reports on the consequences children suffer due to their parents' difficult financial situation.

Based on this knowledge this thesis works with the following problem definition: How do social workers in Child- and Family Counseling manage the families’ finances in preventive cases and how can we understand this?
A qualitative approach is used to examine the problem. Specifically, the use of a vignette method combined with a qualitative semistructured interview method. The vignette method includes information concerning a fictional family which initiates the five social workers thoughts and reflections about the given information. Furthermore, we seek to collect first person's descriptions of their reflections and possibilities of action when managing the families’ finances with the use of a semistructured interview. In addition, we handed the social workers an empty §50 undersøgelse (ed. Paragraph 50 investigation) with the purpose of simulating actual practice. The legislation stipulates that social workers must investigate the families’ finances in the paragraph 50 investigation. Multiple theories are then used to qualify the findings in collected data and interpretations in the analysis. Furthermore, the findings in collected data are supported by 10 available and filled out paragraph 50 investigations, with mainly access to the fields “finances” and “analysis” in the forms.

The study reveals that social workers management of the families’ finances are based on the scope of legislative- and organization framework, from which they can assess the family's situation. However, this study shows that social workers inform that they are limited in their management of the families’ financial challenges due to them being unable to grant direct money to remedy the family's situation, as Child- and Family Counseling is not specialized in finances. Furthermore, our study shows that the social workers inform that they do not investigate and work with the families’ finances, and that this will be apparent in paragraph 50 investigations, where the field “finances” most often will be empty or very sparingly filled out. In addition, our study shows that social workers handle the families' financial challenges in different ways within the scope they have.