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.

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 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.

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.