Research issues in Social Work – some examples from Sweden

Per Gunnar Edebalk
School of Social Work
Lund University
SwedenInternational Conference on “The Frontier of Social Policy Research” in Kyoto
March 12th 20081

1. Introduction
I will talk about research issues in Social Work in Sweden but first I will give
you some information about social policy in Sweden, about the academic
discipline Social Work and about basic training and training for research.
Sweden is a universal welfare state and social security is provided for the entire
population. Doing so is primarily the responsibility of the public sector, i.e. ofboth the national government and local authorities. Consequently, the public
sector is large and tax rates are high.
Local authorities in Sweden have a high degree of autonomy. Local authorities
set their own taxes and local income tax is the main source of revenue formunicipalities. The fact that the local authorities are responsible both for childcare services and for care of dependent older people has very much made it
possible for Swedish women to work in the labour market and pursue careers.
Thus, families in Sweden do not have as important a role in the care of children
and care of the elderly as they do in many other countries.
Income security is mainly provided by social insurance. This system is auniversal one, applying in principle to all inhabitants and giving them quite agood compensation for loss of income while unemployed, sick, retired etc. For
poor and destitute people there is a possibility of getting social assistancefinanced and administered by the local authorities.
2. From social policy to education.
Sweden is a member of the European Union. According to the so called“Bologna declaration” the member states have decided to create a unified designfor higher education in Europe. For Sweden this standardisation drive has juststarted. So from this academic year on, we have a new degree structure and a
new credit system at our universities. I will not go into details here but proceed
to training in Social Work
The basic program in Social Work takes 3 1/2 years that is seven terms. When
having finished the program the student gets a Bachelor degree. Six of the seventerms consist of theoretical studies and during one term we have compulsory
supervised field work.
Graduates in Social Work can find work within a wide social sphere. Social
services departments in local authorities are by far the biggest employers of our
graduates. They offer work in social welfare e.g. with:2• children and their situation (including investigation concerning

custody and adoption)• social assistance• drug abuse• care of disabled persons and elderly
Our graduates also find work as social workers in hospitals, in schools, incorrectional care or in social insurance offices. Social workers also findemployment in institutional care (for children, drug addicts etc).
For Bachelors we have voluntary Master-courses of one or two years´ study.
The Master-students have to write and defend a scientific thesis. Being a masteris a precondition to enter the PhD-program. Four years is generally theminimum for the Ph D exam. Approximately half of the time is devoted towriting a doctoral dissertation. Each Ph D student has a supervisor. Supervisors
are of course professors, but they must nowadays have attended a special course
in supervision. The aim with such a course is to increase the competence of thesupervisors and consequently the quality of dissertations. Such courses willprobably be compulsory also for supervisors in Master-courses.
Students in the PhD-program are regarded as employed by their schools andthey have quite a good salary while studying. As being regarded as employed
they have access to office-space with normal facilities such as telephone,computer-services etc.
In 1977 Social Work was established as an academic discipline in Sweden.
Before that, we had no research in Social Work and students in the social workprogram did not study social work as an academic discipline. In those days theschools of social work had traditional academic disciplines like sociology,
psychology etc. but also more practical courses where the students were training
social work methods.
So Social Work is quite a new academic discipline in Sweden. How do we
define Social Work? The discipline Social Work includes studies of causes ofsocial problems affecting individuals, groups, communities, etc, as well as
problems in relations between individuals and their social environment. It also
includes studies of different solutions to social problems and preventive
measures which can be taken, from a macro-level (i.e. welfare policy) down to a
micro level (i.e. work with individuals). Social Work as a discipline was formed
from the traditional disciplines that we had before.

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This means that professors in Social Work often have another academic
background than Social Work. It could be economics, sociology or psychology.
The younger professors have often their background, their PhD, in Social Work.
Let me say something about how research in Social Work is financed in Sweden.
Much of the research is carried out by the PhD-students, and they have theirsalaries as I said before. Post-graduate research is often financed by independent
state Research Councils. There we have to apply for funds and the competition
is nowadays very tough. As there is a shortage of money now, Swedish researchcouncils provide support only for research of the highest scientific quality. A
frequently used term nowadays is “excellence”. So for instance, only 10-15
percent of those who apply for funds at research councils get money. Anothertendency nowadays is to concentrate funds to multidisciplinary centres of
excellence. In this case researchers in Social Work collaborate with researchers
from other disciplines.
I will now give you some modern examples from Sweden regarding research,
theories and methods used in Social Work. The examples are taken from myown school of social work. In many ways, it is very difficult to do classifications
because research areas are not homogenous as regards problems, theories or
methods and the limits between the areas are not sharp, but I will give it a try.

3. Social Welfare and InsuranceSocial insurance is a cornerstone of the general social welfare system in Sweden
as I mentioned earlier. In addition to social insurance the social welfare system
includes benefits linked to employment, i.e. contractual benefits. When
comparing social welfare in different countries or studying the development
during a long period both social insurance and contractual benefits must be
included to give the whole picture. This is the new way of looking at social
security and this is one of my research areas.
The objective of our recent research is to study the interplay between contractual
benefits and social insurance. Research questions are: Which factors influencecontractual welfare design and spread? How does the government act in relation
to contractual solutions in the labour market? How do trade unions andemployers associations act and how do they look upon different combinations ofsocial insurance and contractual benefits?
In this context I will inform you about something very specific to Sweden thatyou do not find in many other countries, and that is the principle of publicaccess to official records. This means that researchers in Sweden who study for4instance social insurance and welfare have full access to all documents andreports in government authorities and in local authorities (if they do not containmilitary secrets and the like). So when we do research it is quite easy for us to
get information from governmental sources.
In the welfare area we also include studies on “lack of welfare” for instancepoverty, marginalization and social exclusion. This has for some years been avery important research topic in Europe as a whole. For the Swedish welfare
state this research deals with conditions of support, processes of marginalizationand economic disadvantage. Consumer conditions of poor families with children,
juvenile unemployment and difficulties for young persons to settle down during
welfare crises are examples of research issues. Research in this category hasoften an ethnical perspective. Sweden is an immigrant country and many
immigrants and refugees have problems in the labour and housing markets.
The housing situation has played a very important role in the Swedish socialpolitical system. During the last decades there has been a change in housing
policy and the expansive regions of the big cities have experienced difficulties in
the housing market and groups of tenants have been marginalized and homeless.
So studies of homelessness have been important. Research issues here are
primarily variations and local strategies to prevent and take measures against
homelessness. Focus is normally on the municipal welfare level, since it is in themunicipalities that individuals get into contact with the welfare state in the formof local systems, operators and institutions.
For this category I will give you an illustration from a recent doctoral
dissertation. The object of the research was to study the relationship between
consumption and economic scarcity. The study of poor peoples´ consumption
has earlier not been a major issue in research of welfare and poverty.
There were two main questions in the thesis: The first focus on the structuresthat create specific conditions for low-income consumers. The second relates to
how the households cope with the fact that they live with scarce economic
resources.
The empirical material included four different qualitative studies. The studies
indicated that the position that households have in relation to the labour market
and to the welfare security system is crucial to the households´ possibilities asconsumers. A marginalized or excluded position in these fields also tends toraise barriers in the consumer field. The mechanisms in the field of consumption
can therefore be understood as related to those which create processes ofinclusion or exclusion in other fields. For example, unemployment can be seen5

as a marginalized position in the labour market that also hinders in the field ofconsumption. Secondly, the consumer field has its own mechanisms that create
different possibilities for different groups. There are mechanisms that exclude
households with scarce financial resources from different types of consumption.
To get a credit or loan to buy durable consumer goods can be impossible. Also,
consumption can be made more difficult for poor households because for
instance that they do not have a car or access to the internet. The third
mechanism has to do with price. Poor households often have no buffer, nomoney, that they can use in consumption to save money. So they cannot takeadvantage of for instance quantity discounts or sales.

4. Elderly people and care for the elderly
In Sweden, just as in many other industrialized countries, the number of elderly
persons has been increasing. Of the 9 million inhabitants Sweden has at the
moment, slightly more than 17 percent are retired. By the year 2030, thecorresponding figure is 25 percent. The demographic conditions made it more orless necessary to reform our pension-system. The former pension-system was ofa defined-benefit kind. The new pension-system is contribution-based and thesize of one’s pension depends on the sum of these contributions. The more one
has worked and paid in, the larger one’s pension becomes. So there arenowadays no promises that you will get a certain level of pension as was thecase in the former pension-system.
Elderly care in Sweden is, as I have told you before, very much a municipal
matter. For elderly persons, receiving elderly care is a social entitlement, that isregulated by the Swedish social service law. Elderly care in Sweden is financed
to about 95 percent by municipal taxes and to 5 percent by fees. Until recently,
local authorities have had a monopoly in providing elderly care.
Because of economic and demographic developments there has been a tendency
for local authorities to provide help to fewer persons and for help to beconcentrated more and more on persons particularly in need of help. In the
future, elderly persons will probably be more dependent on services and help
from relatives or from voluntary organizations. Volontary organizations play forthe moment a minor role in Sweden.
Different measures have been taken in the local authorities to increase efficiency
in elderly care. A modern measure is to create so called quasi-markets. Thismeans that competition and a market-like situation in elderly care is introduced
and elderly persons are free to choose one of at least two providers, one being
run by the local authorities and the others by private enterprises. There is a
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growing interest for this model in Swedish municipalities in order to increase
quality and efficency in elderly care.
These changes in elderly care are of great interest to follow for our researchers.
The same holds for research about arrangements and facilities to make it easierfor older people to live an independent life in their own homes. Research on
ageing and elderly care is of utmost interest for the national government and forresearch councils, and they have given priority to this kind of research.
So a lot of research is going on within this area. Here you find good examples ofour broad definition of the discipline Social Work. Here you also find different
types of studies in different academic traditions e.g. economics, sociology andpsychology.
Let me give you some examples of research concerning elderly and elderly care.
At our school we have a research program named “Care for the elderly:
conditions and everyday realities”. The research program`s aim is to describe
and make visible the everyday aspects of care for the elderly, as they areexperienced from the perspectives of care providers and care recipients. Veryoften participant observation has been used as a method in these studies.
I will give you an example of a doctoral dissertation within this program. The
dissertation was called “Everyday life in different worlds – dementia and caregivers in three group homes”. This thesis was about the residents and employees
at three group homes for old people suffering from dementia. The empirical dataconsists of participant observations and interviews with the care-givers during 2
years. The aim of the dissertation was to describe and understand what happens
during daily life at the group homes.
Research is also carried out on organization and funding of elderly care. Due toeconomic and demographic pressures these are nowadays very relevant issues.
The same holds for costs and cost-efficiency. Here we find studies oncomparisons of costs of different forms of residence in which care is involved,
such as comparing the costs for a person living and receiving care at home withthe costs for living and receiving care in an institution or special accomodation.
As I mentioned before the Swedish pension system has been reformed. Earlier
we had a defined benefit system, which means that you could plan for yourretirement knowing in advance the level of your pension. The new system is adefined contribution one. The more you have paid in, the higher your pension
will be. So this will probably increase labour supply and more generally have an
impact on peoples´ behaviour. We know very little about this but research isgoing on especially on how people prepare themselves for retirement during the7new circumstances. We have here been involved in a comparative study onplanning for retirement in different countries.
A lot of research in the discipline Social Work concern social organizations i.e.
how welfare providers organize their activities. This kind of research also
applies for elderly care and I will give you an illustration. It is about the caremanager reform in Sweden in the 1990s. First I must say something about thisreform. Community care of the elderly in Sweden was characterized earlier by amonopoly of the local authorities regarding both the assessment of an elderly
person’s need of care and the provision of care. A home help administrator
assessed the care an elderly person needed and was at the same time also incharge of the personnel who provided the care.
A new model that has developed is termed the purchaser-provider split. It
involves keeping assessment of the elderly person’s need of care separate fromthe provision of care. The tasks of the care manager are concentrated aroundneeds-assessment only. Within a fairly short time span, a great number ofmunicipalities decided to implement this new model. So, a central researchquestion was how the rapid diffusion of this organizational model could be
explained.
The research showed that there were differences among the municipalities
concerning the arguments used when the reform was launched and implemented.
A key to understand the impact of the reform is that it over time was ascribed
more and new problem-solving qualities. Among the early adopters, the model
was justified by ideological arguments, and the reform was seen as a necessary
element in the privatization of elderly care. The other municipalities in the study
were not inclined to adopt the model in connection with privatization rhetoric.
So a second discourse, that paved the way for the care manager reform isconnected with cost-efficiency. In this discourse the reform was associated with
control of costs and a more restrictive needs-assessment practice. In the lastphase of adoption, the reform had reached the status of a fashion prescribing themodern way of organizing elderly care.

5. Children and child welfare
Children and child welfare is a traditional and well established topic in Swedishsocial work research. The welfare of future generations has for many decades
been important both for politicians, research funds and researchers.
The concept child includes studies on childhood and persons up to the age of 18,
especially individuals in less privileged circumstances. The concept child8

welfare includes studies on state-family-relations, child welfare organisations,different ways of defining and treating social problems, and on child welfare
programs, interventions and outcomes. Research in this field has different
designs and theoretical approaches. Child welfare is a comprehensive term forsocial measures as to children who suffer or run the risk of suffering in their
immediate environment, who have social problems or are expected to cause
problems as a result of their own behaviour.
Research about children and child welfare has throughout the years had a given
place in the research carried out in Social Work. A number of dissertations andresearch projects have dealt with the efforts by social services and care in
institutions for children. Some research-projects focus on understanding andcauses, others focus on interventions and effects.
Let me give you some examples from modern research. One example is alongitudinal study of children from a children`s residential home. The selectedgroup of children has been followed up, from early childhood to adulthood, i.e.
20-25 years old, with focus on their placement, experiences, well-being, family
relations and social situation. Another research project is called “Children
without home”. The aim of that project is partly to describe and analyse thephenomenon of homeless children, partly to try to describe what it means to behomeless, from the children's point of view and from their parent's perspective.
Many researchers are working on child welfare. Just to give you an illustrationof quantitative methods used in this category I will shortly present a dissertation.
The dissertation was called “Foster Children as adults” and it was based on
statistical analyses. In Sweden 3-4% of all adults have been in foster care. One
research question was: What are the social positions of adults who were in longterm-foster care as children compared to adults who grew up at home in families
similar to the foster children`s birth families? The basic design involved 107
foster children and 128 of their birth siblings who grew up in their mother`s care.
(Siblings have at least the same mother). Micro data from several national
registers and local records on e g education, health, crime and social welfare
were structured in 41 outcome variables. Statistical analyses revealed virtuallyno difference between the two groups. One conclusion could be that long-term
foster care contains risk-factors such as insecure positions for foster children or
problematic identity processes.
In modern research quantitative and statistical methods are used to study effects
of different forms of treatment. This type of research is an important part intrying to introduce evidence based treatment methods into the social services.

9Quite a new type of research has been done on salutogenic and health factors inthe spirit of the Israeli professor Aaron Antonovsky. How can people, in spite of
all the difficulties that life brings, recover and stay well? Which health factors
can explain positive outcomes of an intervention? Here the researchers look forimportant positive factors to help high-risk groups, for instance children andyouth suffering from behavioural disorder or drug abuse. Thus, this type of
research can contribute to new social work practice.

6. Addiction and treatment of addicts
Addiction is seen as a serious social problem in Sweden and research within thefield of addiction has a wide range, from looking at addicts living and life style
to different ways of organizing treatment and national policies to control
addiction.
I will give you two examples of research in this category. The first example is a
study of drug users in a Swedish town. That study described the everyday-life ofa group of drug users during three years. At the same time the researcher tried toanswer the question why the drug users stayed in the addicts´ life and what
advantages that had compared to life in ordinary society. The material wascollected through ethnographic fieldwork in places, where the drug users spent
their time and is based on observations, in-depth interviews and records fromcourts and welfare committees. Why do the drug users continue to use drugs?
According to the research drug users have their reasons for staying in the
addicts´ world. Well, it means misery, but the eventfulness, the shortperspectives, the everything-will-work-out-fine attitude, the sense ofcompetence and the artificial pleasure of the drugs is seen as a better alternative
than ordinary life, which often means being alone, unemployed, poor, idle andthe sense of being superfluous.
Quite another example of research in the field of addiction is a study on national- political level where the policies of Sweden and the Netherlands werecompared. Swedish and Dutch drug policies are usually regarded as opposites.
The goal for the Swedish drug policy is to create a “drug-free society”; while in
the Netherlands a harm reduction policy prevails. The aim of the research was tostudy how the two countries reacted when the “modern” drug problem emergedin the western world in the 1960s. An underlying hypothesis for the study wasthat institutional traditions of formal social control are reproduced when a newsocial problem is established and they influence the problem definition as wellas the action program.

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The results of this study strengthen the hypothesis. The Swedish strong
adherence to fundamentalist principles to the early policy on alcohol led by thecentral government was preserved in the country`s drug policy. The Dutch
experimentalist approach is a prolongation of that country`s tradition ofpragmatism and a restrictive role of the central state.
7. Concluding remarks
As you now understand Social Work in Sweden is a very broad discipline asregards theories, methods and problems chosen for research.
Which are the new tendencies that we can see?
1. Instead of dispersing funds to small individual research projects, a growing
part of research funds is concentrating on centres or “excellent research
environments” in which researchers from different disciplines and departments
are involved. These research centres pursue research in areas especially ofinterest to the Swedish government. Some researchers at our school of Social
Work are involved in three such centres at Lund university.
2. Concentration of resources is also seen in what we call Research schools. In a
Research school different universities cooperate in giving courses and seminars
for Ph D students in a certain discipline. These schools are becoming animportant part of training for research, although we do not have a researchschool as yet in Social Work. But we have applied for funds to start such aschool in order to concentrate our resources and to engage the best teachers.
Research schools are complements to traditional training and not substitutes.
Some of our PhD students take part in research schools established in adjacentdisciplines.
3. Comparative research, where policies in different countries are compared, isvery popular nowadays. Researchers in Social Work are involved foremost in
studies with colleagues in other Nordic countries but also in projects financed by
the European Union. More and more research will in the future be done in a
European context and funded by the European Union.
4. For several years there has been a debate in Sweden on how to develop
evidence-based social work i.e. how to use results from research in developing
methods in practical social work. At the same time there has been a debate on
how to exchange knowledge between theory and practice. As a result of thesedebates, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare announced funds forsome full-scale experimental programs at a national level.

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The aim of the programs was to develop structures to make a deeper andsustainable co-operation possible between the social services departments in themunicipalities and the Schools of Social Work. The Schools are supposed to be
more field-oriented and produce knowledge that social workers need. The social
workers shall be more research-oriented, that is interested in using scientificknowledge in their work and interested in reading scientific articles, attending
conferences etc. To achieve this, social workers must have more of researchknowledge in their basic training. And that is what we now are trying to
implement at Swedish schools of Social Work.
Evidence-based social work also means an interest in evaluations of practicalsocial work. Research is nowadays done on methods of evaluation. Evaluationsof practical social work have come more and more in focus in Sweden.
Diffusion and communication of research-results are nowadays seen as animportant task for researchers in Sweden. Besides education and research this iscalled the “third assignment” for universities in Sweden. It is an official goalthat universities, generally speaking, and consequently schools of social work
should be an integral part of the surrounding community.

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