Revija Socialno delo

Petra Videmšek, Primož Rakovec

The development of self-care is shown, why is this case necessary in the field of social care, and what are the practices used by professional workers in social work for taking care of themselves. The findings of the research showed that professional workers care more for people with personal experiences of distress than for themselves. Very little time, or almost none, is dedicated to them, for their well-being and health. Based on the results of the research, a model of self-care is presented that should be introduced into the daily practice of social care. It is based on the assumption that self-care is not only the responsibility of the individual professional worker, but of the entire team and especially the organization. Self-care is necessary for the ethical implementation of social work.

Maja Kurbus Falež, Alenka Gril

The results of a research on the role of scouts’ activities in strengthening the mental health of young people are presented. In the introduction, the problems in mental health are defined, including the protective and risk factors for the mental health of young people. Ways to boost mental health of scouts are then presented, their effects are also empirically researched among young scouts in Slovenia, together with their needs for support in protecting their mental health. The research was performed using a mixed qualitative-quantitative method. The authors present the results, which showed that scout activities have a very positive impact on their mental health, together with supportive interpersonal relationships and the time they spent in nature as scouts. Scout activities play an important role primarily as a prevention in the field of mental health.

Monika Bohinec

The distress of social workers in centres for social work and NGOs in the fields of mental health, violence and addiction is addressed. Sources of occupational stress for staff arise from the underdevelopment of the service network, the lack of support and accommodation services and programmes in the field of social care, ineffective municipal and state housing policies, staffing norms and shortages, and changes in the health care system. Employees face ethical dilemmas, role conflicts and a constant sense of powerlessness, as providing support and improving quality of life are the missions of social work and if this cannot be put into practice, the consequences manifest themselves in ongoing stress, burnout and secondary traumatisation of professionals. Most users of social care have multiple traumatic experiences, which, in inadequate working conditions, can have a negative impact on the mental health and quality of work of social work practitioners. Social work is identified as a deficit profession in Slovenia, and social policy as well as employers should be concerned with improving the quality of working environment in this field.

Blaž Mesec

The article describes experiments in which Human Intelligence (HI) or a human researcher (HR) communicated with Artificial Intelligence (AI/UI), specifically the chatGPT programme, in analysing the text of two interviews in the field of social gerontology. The general framework of the analysis is grounded in Glaser and Strauss's theory, involving steps that range from transcribing the interviews to coding and defining relevant concepts, leading to a tentative theory. The interaction with AI followed the comparative sequence method, which means that both intelligences, HI and UI, researcher and computer programme, alternated in each sequence of analysis. The researcher prompted responses from the programme with input stimuli, evaluated them, conveyed feedback to the UI, and used it as a basis for the next sequence. It was found that the programme is a valuable tool for qualitative analysis as it provides hints and ideas to the researcher, but the guiding and directing role of the researcher (HR) is essential, especially in formulating the final tentative theory. The feedback provided by the researcher in theory formulation contributes to the programme's learning, making it a progressively better assistant over time when used in qualitative text analysis.

Petra Videmšek

Lea Šugman Bohinc

Liljana Rihter, Mojca Suhovršnik

Mojca Šeme, Primož Šeme