OFFENTLIGA VÅRDGIVARES KOMMUNIKATION I EN MULTIKULTURELL MILJÖ En studie om språk, behov och inkludering

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how communication for public caregivers works in a multicultural environment where a large group of citizens do not speak the main language in the country as their first tongue. The focus is to investigate communicative strategies, if there are language barriers and if so how they can be overcome, and finally how development efforts with regards to feedback can be undertaken to improve caregivers’ work. The method chosen for this study is a combined qualitative research interview and informant inquiry with five informants in Sweden and Great Britain. The main results show that caregivers base their strategies on organisational goals and that they aim for a dialogue perspective with citizens. The methods for the strategies used are generally not based on previous studies, and lack any direct reference to linguistic legislation. However, this does not exclude the informants from still working towards the same aim. Language barriers are experienced by all informants in their work, and possible ways to overcome them have been identified as accessible texts and translation. There could be a conflict between adapting information to fit a target group versus managing to include them, since people can identify themselves in other ways than the generalisation admits. Technical aid, such as speech synthesis, could be utilized more to increase people’s autonomy and thereby meeting individual needs. The study also shows that the informants generally use the main language of their country to communicate. Possible benefits with translation include that receiving knowledge is best accomplished in a person’s first language. Possible disadvantages of translation concern how to work to allocate resources and responsibility for the task. Translation should be based on the needs of the public and avoid strongly context and linguistically bound expressions. The last aspect concerning development shows that the caregivers deal with feedback in different ways, but want to include the dialogue perspective. Research supports this focus in the aim to communicate with a culturally and linguistically diverse target group. The informants also request more tools to improve their work, and intercultural communication education has been identified as one possible way of achieving this.