Based on conversation analysis, this study investigates central practices in what is defined as a caring interview, in the context of welfare administration. Caring refers to (1) a helpful interviewing in reformulations of questions, taking interviewees' difficulties to answer into consideration; (2) a caring attitude in the framing of questions, showing understanding of clients' circumstances and (3) professional's enactment of expertise in assessments of clients' disabilities and care needs. Data include a corpus of 43 recorded interviews in which officials at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency interview clients who have applied for benefits. The study adds to research on interactional sensitivity, polar questions and epistemic stance in institutional interaction. The study shows how the interviewer prioritizes confirming polar questions, takes responsibilities of knowing into account and reduces the epistemic gap to the interviewee in practices of a caring interview. This makes the interviewing markedly different from standardized and bureaucratic interviewing.

En förändring i bemötandet gentemot utomstående forskning har uppstått hos Kriminal­vården. Den är inte lika öppen längre, skriver forskarna Anders Bruhn och Odd Lindberg. 

At the same time as the number of child and youth placements in foster care is increasing in Sweden, some serious deficiencies have been highlighted, such as instability in placements and shortcomings in the social services' monitoring. Because the child welfare workers are ultimately responsible for these children's situation, understanding how they handle their multi-dimensional occupational role is crucial. The aim of this article is to study child welfare workers' individual and collective experiences of and expectations about their occupational role and responsibilities in their administrative and relational work with children and youth in foster care. Individual interviews with child welfare workers from a previous evaluation of a national pilot project, and two focus groups with child welfare workers, constitute the empirical basis. Theoretically the article explores central concepts such as sub-roles, dilemmas, professionalism, and functional specificity. The results show that the child welfare workers are burdened by a heavy workload, but that the prerequisites and the obstacles they face also must be understood in relation to prevailing contradictions and dilemmas in their occupational role. Even though the child welfare workers stress that professionalism is about putting relational work first, their activity is dominated by administrative tasks and functional specificity.

En väl fungerande relation mellan socialarbetare och klient är ett nödvändigt villkor och ett grundelement i allt professionellt socialt arbete. Men trots att relationsarbete är svårt, så problematiseras det sällan i texter som rör det sociala arbetets kärna och karaktär.

I den här boken tar vi oss an just den uppgiften. Några exempel på frågeställningar som boken tar upp:

• Vad kännetecknar ett gott relationsarbete på det sociala arbetets fält?
• Hur kan en väl fungerande relation etableras mellan den professionelle tjänsteutövaren och en klient i ett mer eller mindre utsatt läge?
• Hur och under vilka villkor kan ett gott relationsarbete utföras av socialarbetare inom olika verksamhetsområden?

Bokens kapitel inrymmer både teoretiska fördjupningar och praktiska exempel och kan därför användas såväl inom utbildningar för socionomer och på angränsande fält som inom praktik på olika sociala yrkesfält.

The question of whether the Swedish social services are fulfilling their obligation to monitor and support children in foster care is attracting increasing attention. The importance of closeness and trust between children and their child-welfare officers has been highlighted in particular. The aim of this article is to study foster children's experiences and expectations concerning the role of the child-welfare officer, and how these constitute prerequisites for, and possible obstacles to the officers developing close and trustful relationships with the children under prevailing institutional conditions. Data from our evaluation of a national pilot project with supervision representatives provide the empirical basis. Our theoretical point of departure is that the relationship between the child and the child-welfare officer is affected by the officer's rolea role that is negotiated under the prevailing institutional conditions and in interaction with the children's experiences of and expectations about that role. The results show that most children emphasize that the relationship with their officer is negatively affected by a lack of time, availability, and trust. It is also weakened by the children's general expectation that child-welfare officers only act in their official role, a role that is associated with a formal and distanced relationship.

Prison officers are a key group of civil servants in the criminal justice system. Based on a comparative study of the systems for vocationaleducation in Sweden and Norway, this article compares policies andstrategies for developing the prison officer occupation. Differencesin this domain are analysed against the backdrop of theories aboutprofessionalization and growing differences between these countriesconcerning the ends and means of prison policy in general. Datacome from interviews and documents collected in 2013–2014, aswell as a rereading of data from two earlier prison-research projects.Results show that Norway is adopting a strategy quite similar to theone behind the birth of the so-called welfare professions duringthe heyday of the social-democratic welfare state. In Sweden, thecontinuing division of labour is leading to enhanced skills amongsome specialized subgroups, such as security and programme staff,but a reduction in qualifications for the majority. The study should beof interest in relation to different strategies for developing the workof prison officers as well as of other categories of public servants.It points to growing differences between two welfare regimes thatused to be quite similar, not least concerning the prison policy field.