French and Swedish teachers' social representations of social workers

Abstract

Collaboration on children at risk is essential, but our knowledge about inter-professional collaboration between social workers and educators is limited. The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to describe French and Swedish teachers' social representation of social workers; and (2) to compare these social representations. The French sample group is composed of 77 secondary school teachers (of students from 11 to 18 years old), and the Swedish sample group is composed of 94. The method used was a ‘free association task’, commonly used to access the semantic content of social representation. Two different social representations of social workers were revealed, one for the French and one for the Swedish teachers. The French representation is characterised by highly positive aspects such as support, listening and competence. Swedish teachers' social representation of social workers is completely different: negative associations were common (44%), and among these, professional secrecy and law and regulations dominated. One plausible explanation is the difference of French and Swedish teachers' roles regarding collaboration with social workers.

Sur la thématique de l'enfance en danger, la collaboration interprofessionnelle est une dimension essentielle, mais nous avons une connaissance limitée de celle-ci, notamment entre travailleurs sociaux et enseignants. Le but de cette étude est double: (i) décrire la représentation des travailleurs sociaux portée par des enseignants français et suédois; et (ii) comparer ces représentations sociales. L’échantillon français se compose de 77 enseignants du secondaire (élèves entre 11 et 18 ans) et l’échantillon suédois de 94. Nous avons utilisé une ‘tâche d'association libre’, couramment convoquée pour déterminer le contenu sémantique des représentations sociales. Deux représentations sociales différentes des travailleurs sociaux apparaissent, une pour les enseignants français et une pour les enseignants suédois. La représentation de l’échantillon français est caractérisée par des aspects très positifs, comme l'aide, l’écoute et les compétences. Celle de l’échantillon suédois est complètement différente: les associations négatives sont beaucoup plus fréquentes (44%) et parmi celles-ci, le secret professionnel et les dimensions de contrôle et du rapport à la loi dominent. Une explication plausible est la différence des rôles des enseignants français et suédois concernant la collaboration avec les travailleurs sociaux.

Keywords:

• social representation
• children at risk
• child welfare
• international social work
• professions

Motsclés:

• représentation sociale
• enfance en danger
• protection de l'enfance
• travail social international
• professions

Notes on contributors

Prof. Berth Danermark is the senior researcher in the Swedish Institute of Disability Research (SIDR). The research themes of interest are inter-disciplinarity, collaboration and disability. He is one of the founding chairpersons of the The Swedish Institute for Disability research. He is also member of the Academic Network of European Disability Experts. Current address: Per Germundsson, Department of Health and Welfare Studies, Malmö University, SE-205 06 Malmö, Sweden.

Ulrika Englund has a bachelor in Public Health. She is a doctoral student in disability research at The Swedish Institute for Disability research. Her research focus is interorganizational collaboration.

Per Germundsson, Ph.D. works as Assistant Professor in Social Work at Malmö University. In recent years he has focused collaboration between public and private stakeholders in the welfare state. He has participated in several research projects and evaluations of collaborative processes. In his doctoral thesis, he has studied teachers, social workers and their collaboration on children at risk.

Pierre Ratinaud is assistant professor (Maître de conférences) of Education at Département des Sciences de l'Education et de la FormatioN, Laboratoire LERASS. His research interest is social representation and methodologies in the field.

Notes

1. For example, if we make a free association in a group of ten persons and three of these persons have ‘A’ and ‘B’ in their answers, the pair (‘A’, ‘B’) will have a score of 30%.

2. In the graph theory, this kind of matrix can be represented by a graph in which the points (i.e., words) are called vertices and the lines joining the points are called edges. Edges are weighed by scores of co-occurrences. When the number of points increases, the graph becomes progressively more complex (Flament & Rouquette, 2003). In order to make the information comprehensible, the graph is simplified by transforming it into a maximum tree. In the graph theory, a tree is the graph in which there is only one way to go from one vertex to another. The maximum tree is the most weighed of possible trees (Degenne & Vergès, 1973). These analyses have been done with iramuteq (Ratinaud, 2009) which uses the igraph package (Csardi & Nepusz, 2006) of the R statistical software (R Development Core Team, 2009).