Abstract
The main focus of this thesis is the collaboration between social workers and clients. We investigate how social workers relate to the asymmetric power relation in their collaboration with the client in their daily work. Our aim is to get a better understanding on how power can influence this collaboration, and with a hermeneutic approach we seek to get this insight through descriptions from the social workers about their experiences on collaborating with the clients. The empirical data consists of 4 individual interviews with social workers working with families in a big Danish municipality. Since there has been a great interest in the field of research regarding power in social work, most of the thesis’ theory is inspired from different research papers on this topic.
The thesis argues that power appears in different ways and affects the social workers daily work. Especially power relating to the normalisation process and to steering the client’s development in a certain way is depending on the collaboration and the willingness of the client. The thesis illustrates how the social workers use different strategies focused on gaining trust from their clients, to establish the best possible foundation for collaboration. One of these strategies concerns transparency and directness. The social workers are clear about their thoughts concerning decisions and options to act as a way of presenting themselves as trustworthy. The general experience of the social workers indicates that the clients are fearful due to the social workers power which can result in placement of children. Therefore they try to minimise the power they have by emphasizing they rarely use it. They also seek to appear more harmless, for instance, by showing a more personal side of themselves to the clients. In this way they try to reduce their “dangerousness” and get the clients to trust them and therefor collaborate with them. The thesis argues that the social workers try to include the clients in the handling of their cases, but at the same time there are limits to how much influence the social workers can give the clients because of their different structural positions. A lot of the collaborating work consists of the social workers trying to get the clients to see the problems from their point of view. If the client oppose the collaboration, it can result in potential conflict, which can affect the social worker’s ability to do their job and ensure the client’s development process.
Finally, the thesis concludes that the collaboration is crucial for the social workers to achieve their final goal with their work, which is to ensure the clients’ children’s well-being.