The Convention on the Rights of the Child in practice: Social workers’ experience and acting space when implementing the Convention within the City of Gothenburg

Abstract

The aim with this thesis is to examine how social workers, who work in short-term and long term residential housing activities within the City of Gothenburg and meet children in their work with adults, experience the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in practice, and their perceived circumstances related to opportunities and obstacles regarding the implementation of CRC. As such, the research question that guided the aim are: How do social worker experience that CRC works in practice? What are the social workers own experience regarding interacting and caring communicating with the children they meet? How do social workers as street-level bureaucrats experience their own acting space when working with CRC in practice? The thesis gives new insight into how children´s rights are met at different levels within the City of Gothenburg, as most previous research has focussed on social secretaires experience of the implementation of the convention, looking at social workers experience can help to get an insight into how the convention are established at different levels. The analysed empirical material consists of five interviews of social workers, who works in these short-term and long-term residential housing activities. The data material has been analysed using content analysis, where theoretical frameworks from care science concepts and street-level bureaucracy theory has been used to interpret the results. The analysis found that these social workers experience a certain ambiguity about how to work with CRC in practice. Both in terms of implementing CRC in their tasks, and how much they should involve the children by communicating with them. In addition, this study also showed that social workers' own experiences of acting space, when working with CRC in practice, as bureaucrats at street-level, are perceived to be limited.