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This article explores how Swedish social workers in different sectors of the social services understand complexity in relation to the needs found in ‘family’ and in social work practice. This study is based on interviews with sixty social workers in five service sectors: child welfare, elderly care, disability care, substance abuse and social assistance. The social workers’ reports of understanding and dealing with families with complex needs reveal distinctions between deeply rooted and broadly based needs. Complex family needs are transformed into complex cases based on family composition, relationships between clients and social workers and organisational context. Complexity theory, and in particular the term transactional complexity, is applied to describe the interactive relationship in and between complex needs, relational complexity and organisational complexity. The boundaries between these three domains are not distinct, and the interconnectivity and complexities occurring in and between them contribute to the production of much of the ‘wickedness’ that exists in social work practice. Social workers may gain from this knowledge in order to unravel the often intangible complexity that commonly appears in social work with families.

This paper elucidates how Swedish child welfare social workers manage complexity co-occuring in the families with which they work and the organisational contexts of practice. Focus groups were held with social workers in three municipalities in Sweden who described work processes generally and in response to a fictitious vignette. The vignette was constructed as a complex family situation to explore how social workers approach complexity when faced with a family with complex needs. Findings showed that social workers are challenged in their everyday work where they are aware of the many needs in a family. They focus on immediate conditions for children while recognising that some problems are less amenable to being solved. However they try to manage complexities related to families as well as the structural conditions of work by sorting, prioritising and oscillating between a child focus and a family service orientation. This paper serves as a necessary reminder of the complexity of social work in the broader area of child welfare and raises further questions about the use of comparative typologies to explain social work practices.

In Sweden, municipal social services provide help and support for vulnerable people with a variety of needs. Although the family has long been understood to be a focus of social work interventions, it is unclear how it is brought into the casework process in the highly individualised and specialised municipal social services. Therefore, in this study we investigated processes of client-making and role assignment in five service sectors: social assistance, child welfare, substance abuse, disability, and elderly care. We carried out focus group interviews with social workers in each of these sectors in a mid-sized community in central Sweden. Findings showed that clienthood and the family are interpreted in different ways. The family is brought into or kept out of service provisions in ways that are connected to social workers’ construction of the family either as expert, client or non-client. However, the role of the family may also change during the casework process. Findings are examined in relation to theories of the welfare state and implications for family-focused practice are discussed.

This paper investigates how children who have experienced instability in substitute family care describe their sense of belonging and relationships with adults who share responsibility for caring for them. Using an interpretive phenomenological methodology, we interviewed twelve children in Swedish foster and institutional care. Our study found that the children craved a close relationship with consistent adults and an opportunity to feel that they belonged somewhere. These needs were difficult for them to receive due to their parents' problematic life histories, instability in care which repeatedly placed them in new care situations and a lack of continuity of social workers. These children endured a repeated disconnection to those adults who were supposed to share the role of raising them and, at the same time, an incredible ability to adapt to new care environments was demanded of them. After continually losing relationships, some children finally decided to ‘hold off adults’ in order to not get hurt. Working with and caring for children who have experienced unstable care puts great demand on adults to develop relationships that children feel will be consistent and that they can trust.

In Mexico, institutional care is the most widely used out-of-home placement resource for children who have been either abandoned by their parents or removed from their families to protect them from harm. Currently there are over 29,000 children and adolescents placed in approximately 725 institutions in Mexico. However, little is known about the perspectives of young people about their lives in this setting. We set out to explore young people's descriptions of their lived experience of everyday life in one institutional care setting in Mexico, with a focus on their daily activities and their relationships to significant others. Multiple qualitative methods (adapted Photovoice, mapping and focus groups) were used by researchers from both Mexico and Sweden. In this paper, we explore and analyze their experiences of being 'almost home' and living in an 'almost family'. Life in the institution could be characterized as a highly structured, total institution wherein young people looked for ways to take control over times and places. It was safe but not quite home. Life was also strongly connected to stigma. Although in long-term placements, they refused to be labeled 'orphans'. The stigma of being called orphans and living in the confines of the institution was countered by the young people's descriptions of importance of feeling safe, being adequately supported and cared for, having a sense of comfort and normality where they are living, and having emotional connections to those they live with. Being listened to and having a say in decisions related to their lives were also strongly recurrent themes in our study. This paper concludes with a discussion of implications for practice with children and youth in institutional care. 

This article focuses on how families are defined and conceptualized by social workers in the Swedish social services. Using a qualitative study design, we carried out telephone interviews with 60 social workers in five major sectors of the social services in two smaller and two larger municipalities. These sectors included elderly care, disability, child welfare, addiction and economic support, with a qualitative content analysis approach used to analyze the data.The results showed that the practices in social service organizations are both individualized and specialized. Social workers primarily focus on the individual as the client when deciding upon interventions, and when asked about how they regard, define and delimit the family in their work, our analysis revealed that different mediating mechanisms were engaged in what can be seen as a deconstruction of the family. These mechanisms included legislation (as a control mechanism), household composition (boundary mechanism) and service needs (professional mechanism), which were used in various ways and to differing degrees within each sector. The resultant five unique and sector-specific conceptualizations of families are implicated in how interventions are constructed and work processes targeted at individuals and families.

Placement breakdown is a frequently occurring phenomenon in the context of out-of-home care. Although research has pointed to the many problems associated with placement instability and breakdown, less is known about foster parents’ experiences. We carried out deep interviews with foster parents to investigate connections between their caring experiences and experiences of placement breakdown. Results of our study demonstrate that breakdown is a complex process rather than a single event – a process that starts in the discrepancy between the statutory obligations of the social services toward the foster home and the foster parents’ perceptions of the kind if information and support they actually receive from the social services. High demands are placed on foster parents’ ability to provide care and offer a loving home to children who have been raised in difficult environments and who have behaviour problems. The road to breakdown also included a lack of knowledge about the child’s needs, insufficient understanding of the placement process, a difficult relationship with the social worker, and a lack of individualized service with the right supports at the right time. Although the placement may have ended in breakdown, foster parents described a continuing relationship between their families and child which was of lasting significance.