Project website: Website SODELO  

Project type: Basic research project

Code: J5-2566 (A) - iz evidence ARRS

Beginning: 01.09.2020

End: 31.12.2024

Funding: Slovenian Research Agency

Coordinator: University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Work

Leader: Prof. Darja Zaviršek

Associates:

Other milestones:

Menimo, da je modificirano in nadgrajeno sosledje metod dela inovativno prilagojeno naravi raziskave.

Summary:

Social work as an organized social practice and as a social science is an important part of the welfare state. The basic task of social work, which is part of the state apparatus, is the regulation of social inequalities. In recent decades, in Slovenia and elsewhere in the world, we have seen tendencies to reduce and privatize social work activities. These are accompanied, among other things, by systematic media attacks on practicing social workers and on the professional principles of social work.

The above highlights the need to analyze the other side of the problem: does the social work institution itself contribute to the vulnerability of social work practice? Research into the experiential professional history of social workers and their reflection on their own profession places them at the heart of the empirical research process. At the same time, we systematically take into account the special historical development of social work and its practices in Slovenia, which with its modern beginnings dates back to 1950 in Yugoslav socialism, and which in its organized practice also has the experience of changing the political system after Slovenian independence in 1991.

The research therefore has two interrelated objectives:

• First, use selected methods to explore how social practitioners today perceive and manage their profession on their own. We will be interested in their experiences, which form the contents of professional culture: how in practice they resolve tensions between academic discipline and the reality of the profession, and growing social problems for which less and less resources are available, as well as the declining public reputation of the profession.

• Second, to collect, review, edit and perform a set of the most important historical data sources in the field of social work in Slovenia, which is already partially collected. The purpose is primarily to support and contextualize the obtained empirical results with the factual history of the institution of social work, organized by historical turning points, from beginnings to professionalization to the turning point in 1991 and to the t.i. post-socialist transition time.