Socialno delo, Vol. 54 (2015), Issue 2
ARTICLES
Work like any other, work like no other: regulation strategies of home based care work - 79, (Abstract) (Full text)
The role of social capital on prevention of child and adolescent abuse in the family - 99, (Abstract) (Full text)
Fairytales as a tool in social work with children - 111, (Abstract) (Full text)
Abstracts
Majda Hrženjak
Work like any other, work like no other: regulation strategies of home based care work
(Full text)
While after the World War II, paid care work in private households has almost disappeared because of the rising welfare systems, in last decades it is again in steep increase all over the Europe given the restructuring of the role of state in social reproduction which leads to individualization and reprivatisation of care work. This work is marked by multiple peculiarities such as: location in private sphere of households; fragmentation, flexibilisation and informalization; feminization and etnicization; social devaluation, and at the same time it has no clear status in modern labour legislation. The article analyzes selected transnational and national strategies, including the Slovenian one, which promote regulation of home based care work from the perspectives of quality of employments and care services.
Keywords: care regimes, unpaid work, gender, labour market, policies, grey economy.
Majda Hrženjak, PhD., a sociologist, is a research fellow in the fields of social policies, gender studies and cultural studies at the Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana. Contact: majda.hrzenjak@guest.arnes.si.
Klavdija Kustec
Potential negative effects of expressive-creative media
(Full text)
The use of expressive-creative media in the professions of help and support has been gaining grounds. The aim of the research study is to shed light both on the positive effects of the work with expressive-creative media and their potential negative effects or risk factors, with indicating some of the safety factors of work with expressive-creative media. The results of the qualitative research show that in practice professional workers of related helping professions have not encountered any negative effects in their work with expressive-creative media, while being very much aware of possible risk factors. Accordingly, they developed numerous strategies of alleviating, if not completely avoiding, potential risk factors.
Keywords: qualitative research, risks, art, expert workers, safety factors, art therapy.
Klavdija Kustec is an Assistant Lecturer in personal counselling and group work at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana. Her specific research-development and practical area of work focuses on work with expressive/creative media in social work and in giving psychosocial help and support. Contact: klavdija.kustec@fsd.uni-lj.si.
Ksenija Domiter Protner
The role of social capital on prevention of child and adolescent abuse in the family
(Full text)
The article presents the connection between, on the one side, the problem of child and adolescent abuse in the family, and on the other side, the characteristics of the social environment of the family from the viewpoint of social ecological perspective of domestic violence and the phenomenon of resilience of domestic violence victims in relation to social capital. The findings obtained on the basis of secondary analysis of data of the researches are also presented. These findings demonstrate the characteristics of social capital of Slovene adolescents in relation to adolescent exposure to domestic violence. Elimination, reduction and resolution of risk factors appear as important as strengthening of protective factors, among which social capital plays an important role. It is established that social capital is a protective factor both in preventing violence as in reducing the impact which this violence has on the victim.
Keywords: violence, resilience, risk factors, prevention.
Ksenija Domiter Protner, PhD, is an assistant professor for sociology at the Facutly of arts, University of Maribor. Contact: ksenija.protner@guest.arnes.si.
Maša Avsec, Nino Rode
Fairytales as a tool in social work with children
(Full text)
Fairytales can help a social worker to bridge the gap between the child's and her way of thinking and facilitate the communication between them. For the child they have important developmental and healing powers. That is why stories are useful in counseling and psychotherapy. In social work they are useful principally as a mean of contact and mutual co-creation of solutions. Safe houses and maternity homes are the places where numerous opportunities exist for the use of fairytales. These organizations help mainly mothers, but working with their children is also important. When working with children, the fairytales are used in individual work (e.g. making first contact) as well as group work (e.g. workshops). They are told by a social worker or by a child, but there are also other modes of story use. Most of the interviewed social workers stated that they feel competent for the use of fairytales in their work, but they also expressed a need for further training. Story use is a creative cultural activity which besides general social work competencies requires some additional knowledge and abilities for working with children, ability to use different storytelling techniques and an overall feeling for working with fairytales. That is why additional training and education for this kind of work is needed.
Keywords: safe houses, maternity homes, guidelines, competencies.
Maša Avsec graduated at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana. She is interested in stories and storytelling. Contact: masha.avsec@gmail.com. Nino Rode, an assistant professor, is a lecturer of the statistics and research methodology at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana. He is interested mainly in the social work research methods, evaluation social security programmes, use of the multivariate methods and measurement. Contact: nino.rode@fsd.uni-lj.si.
Blaž Rojko, Nino Rode
Importance of choirs for community building
(Full text)
Community projects addressing »target groups« mostly miss the needs of a real community, and are therefore not very welcome by the community. To solve this problem it’s good to organise the projects in cooperation with the existing communities. The choirs are among such communities. They are important in social work not only as the environment for the community projects, but also as a place where the emerging communal processes and social interactions act as the protective factors for the individual and enable spontaneous collaborative solving of the social problems. In the presented research the values and attitudes of the choir members were ascertained, and the impact of socio-demographic factors on them was explored. Based on the factor analysis, four scales of the attitudes toward the social processes in the choirs were determined. The intergeneration relations, the importance of singing, socializing and social network, and self-affirmation through the choir are the most important concerns for the choir singers. Among others, gender, marital status and employment influence these attitudes. They are also contingent on the choir status. It has been confirmed that besides the cultural organisations the choirs are important autopoetic communities, which can offer support and feeling of identity to their members. As such they are an important environment for the community social work, and therefore some financial resources dedicated for the social security should be invested in them.
Keywords: community social work, attitudes, singing, socio-demographic factors, socialising.
Blaž Rojko is a composer, a choirmaster, a freelance artist, and a graduate of the Faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana. As a choirmaster he is interested in social aspects of the choir singing. Contact: blaz.rojko@guest.arnes.si. Nino Rode, an assistant professor, is a lecturer of the statistics and research methodology at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana. He is interested mainly in the social work research methods, social security programmes evaluation, use of the multivariate methods and measurement. Contact: nino.rode@fsd.uni-lj.si.