Developing scales for apps together - youth and municipal case worker perspectives

This article reports the initial findings of a Danish action research project aiming to develop a digital tool that young persons could use to inform their municipal case workers about their wellbeing. The project vision was an integrated system with a smartphone interface for young persons, and a web interface for case workers, whereby both parties could track how the young persons were doing. Three meetings were held between researchers, software developers, young persons and their case workers. The young persons rejected self-monitoring on a normative scale. They rejected a scale proposed by case workers that encouraged them to focus on a positive future, favoring a scale which enabled them to focus on their wellbeing being low. The young persons and case workers disagreed about how data regarding change should be presented. Case workers preferred a graph that highlighted risk, where young persons favored a graph that emphasized positive change

Revitalizing social work education through global and critical awareness : Examples from three Scandinavian schools of social work

Increasing globalisation, reorganisation of the Scandinavian welfare regimes and the awareness of increasing global roots of local social problems necessitated change in the curriculum of social work in three Scandinavian schools of social work in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Recent global transformations, increasing global inequalities, increasing forced migration and the emergence of glocal social problems make the traditional education and methods of social work ineffective and in some cases harmful for people in need of social work intervention. This article examines the need to provide critical, global and multilevel perspectives in social work education in order to prepare social work students for the increasing social problems with global roots. The article, which is based on cross-national collaborations in social work education between three Scandinavian countries, addresses global and critical components in theoretical courses, professional training and field practice in the social work education of the countries in question. It is argued that social work education should move beyond the old division of classical and international/intercultural toward including global and critical perspectives in an integrative manner in all programs