People processing in Swedish personal social services. On the individuals, their predicaments and the outcomes of organisational screening

Abstract

By utilising data on nearly 1 200 individuals subject to investigations in the three Swedish personal social services (PSS) domains – child welfare (CW), social assistance (SA) and substance abuse treatment (SAT) – this article aims at describing and analysing the individuals processed in PSS as well as the outcome of the filtering process. Specific attention is paid to the extent the PSS domains differ in these respects. The main findings are: (i) a large proportion of clients subject to investigation are men, singles (most common without children in SA and SAT) and a born outside of Sweden (CW and SA). In terms of overall predicaments, SAT raw material seem more exposed than that of SA whereas there are fairly low concentration of abuse and neglect in CW; (ii) recidivism rates are high in all PSS domains: about half of the sample are already known by the agencies; (iii) out-screening are similar in SA and SAT (about 25%) but substantially higher in CW (about 50%). The investigative process is associated with considerably low external and in particular internal referring, indicating an apparent silo mentality between the PSS domains.

Keywords:

• Substance abuse
• social welfare
• child welfare
• social administration
• organisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In addition to PSS, Swedish social services entail care for the elderly and the disabled (typically addressed by non-academic work force in separate organisational settings). Only PSS is addressed in this article.

2. (a) By investigations we mean individual/household specific cases; in those cases (in total nine) where further investigations were opened, the case that was first opened has guided us in processing of data; (b) As regards the domains CW and SAT, data has been retrieved during a two-month period (March–April) while the SA data only refers to one month (April). This is due to the greater influx of cases in the SA domain; (c) As regards CW, data has been retrieved from in total 24 municipalities, one of the municipalities selected was excluded due to staff turnover.

3. Clients who were to receive introduction benefit which is primarily given to newly arrived immigrants have been excluded from the population. The same applies to clients who were 65 years old when their case was opened.

4. The external attrition only concerns data retrieved in conjunction with measuring point (I) (see below). Divided between different domains, the non-response rate is 16.5% for SA, 21.5 % for CW and 12.3% for SAT.