The project Aging in Place applies a novel approach to investigate how social care services in Sweden are adapted to preferences and needs of older persons (65 years and older) living at home with dementia, including their partners. The project covers the process that starts when a person is granted to receive services, which are communicated to a care provider – who should organize the services – and finally reach the receiving older person. This approach differs from previous research on elder care, which has focused either on the purchaser or the provider side of Swedish municipal elder care in the purchaser-provider model Sweden adopted since the mid-1990s. The project focuses on: 1) what specific social care services older persons living at home with dementia are granted; if a dementia diagnosis is needed for some services; and the differences between municipalities; 2) how care providers organise granted services and adapt them to people living with dementia; including differences between municipalities and care provider units; 3) how care recipients living with dementia (including co-habiting partners) experience and influence the receiving of services. The ambition is to generate both generalisable knowledge about social care services for people living with dementia in Sweden, including differences between municipalities and care providers, and in-depth, exploratory knowledge about how care providers organise services and how these services are received by care recipients. The project encompasses a necessary combination of methods and materials: register studies, web surveys, as well as observations and interviews. The project will provide important, elemental, knowledge on Swedish dementia- and eldercare. This knowledge is needed as a basis for further studies and as a contribution to discussions on how future social care can be developed to ensure people living with dementia, and their partners, equality, participation, and dignity in later life.

Summary: Client documentation fulfills a variety of purposes in social work. As research on this topic has steadily increased, so has the need to take stock of what characterizes the literature in this area. This paper presents the results of a scoping review of 490 peer-reviewed articles published in English in this field, with a specific analysis of a subsample (n = 95) that explicitly focuses on documentation as a research theme and relies on client documentation as a source of data.

Findings: While nearly half of the 490 articles analyzed mention documentation in at least four sections, only one-third posed research questions directly addressing it. This suggests that much of the peer-reviewed literature in English on documentation in social work treats documentation tangentially rather than as a central theme. The array of analyses performed also shows that documentation research is unevenly distributed across social work domains, and that Child Welfare and Protective Services (CWPS) is the domain that has thus far contributed the most to research in this area. In addition, this review highlights the key areas of inquiry that are addressed in research that uses client documentation as data and has research questions/aims on documentation.

Applications: This paper exposes some of the knowledge gaps that characterize social work research on client documentation and argues that investing in delineating a future research agenda for this topic would benefit not only social work scholarship but also practice.

Decisions regarding welfare services take place within a web of legal, political, and organizational structures, shaping the scope of social workers’ legal decision-making authority (DMA). Social workers are often assumed to have full legal authority to decide on welfare services, yet the influence of local political policies on their legal options remains underexplored. This study examines how hard local political policies governing legal DMA affect social workers’ discretion in distributing elder care. By analysing these policies, we reveal the structures that condition social workers’ legal options to provide services. Using elder care in Swedish municipalities as an example, we investigate how different types of hard local political policies create varying premises for social workers’ legal authority to make decisions. Counter-texts are analysed through a comparison of four strategic examples. Our findings show that local politicians use different strategies when delegating authority. As a result, social workers face varying premises regarding what decisions they are legally permitted to make. These results highlight the dependence of social work practice on local politics and underscore the need to study macro-level contexts. Understanding these structures is crucial for interpreting social workers’ working conditions in the provision of welfare services.

Hur kan biståndshandläggare stödjas i att utreda äldre pars behov? Det har forskare från Linköpings universitet undersökt i ett forskningsprojekt, där kommunikation står i fokus. 

The progression of dementia often leads to significant life changes, with particular emphasis placed on memory decline and increased forgetfulness. People living with dementia (PlwD) are frequently subjected to stereotyping as profound forgetful individuals, a phenomenon termed dementism. This paper develops a comprehensive conceptual framework of dementism grounded in the social psychological theory of ageing. The proposed framework identifies four key psychosocial factors: emotional reactions and beliefs, social attribution, exclusion and avoidance, and denial of humanness. This framework does not aim to replace existing social research paradigm in dementia studies but rather offer novel theoretical insights through a critical lens to advance the field. We argue that psychosocial and cultural principles are fundamental to dementia care, emphasising the importance of valuing personhood and the subjective experiences of PlwD. This approach promotes enhanced sensitivity, social equality and justice in dementia care practices. Building on this framework, we conclude with targeted recommendations for future research, particularly focusing on strategies to prevent discriminatory behaviours towards PlwD. We propose that implementing antioppressive practices can help remediate dementism and foster more inclusive respectful care environments. This framework provides a foundation for understanding and addressing the complex psychosocial challenges faced by PlwD, ultimately contributing to more dignified and person-centred approaches to dementia care.

Few studies have explored the moral and ethical dimensions of how, in practice, socialworkers talk about and handle cases as part of their daily work. At the same time,identifying and examining the ethical dimensions of actual social work practice can bechallenging because ethics is often hidden within the complex particularities of daily work.This article applies and develops Sarah Banks’ conceptualisation of “ethics work” toexamine how care managers in Sweden are “doing ethics”, while seeking and providingcollegial support and guidance on how to deal with the wishes of adult (potential) serviceusers who are reluctant to accept support – or whose wishes in the matter are difficult todetermine. The study is based on an analysis of 14 audio-recorded case conferences. With the help of Banks’ conceptualisation, the analysis makes visible how the case discussions inquestion encompass a complex “doing of ethics”, by means of which the welfare ofindividuals is balanced against care managers’ legal duty to adhere, without exception, tothe principle of self-determination. The findings suggest that further research that appliesand develops Banks’ conceptualisation of ethics work by examining “actual” social workpractice in situ, while recognising the particularities of the social and societal context inwhich this work is taking place, could provide new knowledge and understanding aboutboth the specific and common challenges that social workers face in different parts of the world. It could also make the ethical dimensions of social work practice more widely recognised and valued.

När biståndshandläggare möter äldre par där det finns en demenssjukdom behöver de balansera olika perspektiv och behov. I kapitlet presenteras biståndshandläggares berättelser av hur de hanterar svåra situationer i behovsbedömningsmöten.  

Research has explored how social workers in team constellations perform assessments of the needs of clients in case conferences. However, the process in which gatekeeping is applied in the categorization of clients as inappropriate receivers of support in collegial discussions has received less attention. This article presents findings from a case study of a complex case where a 64-year-old person with dementia was assessed by two teams of social workers handling the same case under two different forms of legislation (elder care and disability services). The data consist of recordings of two case conferences in one Swedish social work agency. The conferences were analysed using positioning theory. The findings suggest that the conferences contained different storylines where the social workers categorized the client as an inappropriate receiver of support. Furthermore, the discourses for gatekeeping differed depending on how the social workers positioned the client in the different storylines in the case conferences. The study shows that institutional and professional responsibilities are central to the assessments that the social workers perform, and that there is a risk that the client will be subject to gatekeeping when the case is handled on an ambiguous legal basis in different legislations, which may result in the client falling between two stools. The findings suggest that research needs to explore, in a more systematic manner, how social workers’ gatekeeping practices are performed in collegial team discussions.