The purpose of this study was to investigate whether social counselling via chat conversations could meet the criteria for a professional conversation, and how the six social workers who were interviewed felt that it had affected the profession and the clients who are seeking their help.

Communication, professionality, power, roles and regions are the key topics of this study. A hermeneutic approach has not only influenced the interviews but also the content analysis that was used to encode the results.

The interviews revealed that the chat conversations was a successful tool but not entirely without difficulties. The initial contact making between the client and the social worker favours the client, since she/he remains anonymous and that was the main advantage of the method. The biggest concern however was that in the anonymity it is not possible to report cases that the social worker are obligated to. The changing of forum does not necessarily affect the professionality but due to the faceless chat conversation an entire dimension of communication disappears because the loss of body language. Therefore, the traditional face-to-face conversation contains a value that is hard to replace