Browsing by Subject "teori om välmående"

Digital inclusion is an urgent theme in Finland and globally. International and Finnish research promotes social workers to consider clients´ use of social media to protect clients from risks and for guiding clients to use social media in a beneficial manner. The aim of this master’s thesis is to investigate social workers experiences of the main motives for using social media and its importance in adult clients´ lives focusing on wellbeing. The study has a qualitative and phenomenological approach. The research data consists of open-ended surveys (N=40) and three thematic interviews. The respondents consist of social workers who works with adult clients. The thematic analysis proceeded with deductive and abductive approaches. The analysis emanated from Allardt´s theory of wellbeing and theory of uses and gratifications. The results implicates that the social workers had diverse experiences of clients´ use of social media: some had never discussed social media with clients, while others had discussed the matter often. In between there are various extents of discussing the subject. The social workers had more experience of talking about social media with young adults than with the elderly. The experiences of whether everybody has possibilities to purchase smart devices were various. Access to social media is a precondition for getting the benefits of social medias affect on wellbeing but also exposes to the risks social media has on wellbeing. Similarly, no access to social media means no access to social media´s positive nor negative sides. The social workers in this study had experiences of clients using social media for all four motives of media use: information, integration and social interaction, personal identity and entertainment. Integration and social interaction were in this study a strong theme which social workers had experiences of. In all four motives of media use both positive and negative phenomenon arised and the negative experiences showed a wide spectrum. One possible explanation to the negative experiences’ dominance could lie in the social work´s problem-oriented nature. Most of the respondents thought that knowledge of clients´ use of social media is significant in the context of social work.