A cross‐cultural comparison of how social workers in Sweden and England assess a migrant family

Abstract

Vignettes are short descriptions of a social situation or a person that embrace references to what are thought to be the most important factors in the decision‐making of respondents. This article presents vignette data showing that social workers in Leicester, England and in Örebro, Sweden make different assessments when they are confronted with information about an immigrant family. One leading feature of the data is that all the respondents in Leicester immediately think that the information about the situation of the family might be false or malicious just because the family are immigrants. Another leading feature of the data is that a majority of the social workers in Örebro consider the information to be correct. Many of these social workers relate the problem to the family's cultural background. The empirical data are interpreted with concepts borrowed from the fields of culture and organization research, respectively. The most leading features of the data are interpreted in terms of ethnocentric, bureaucratic‐minded social workers (in Örebro) and culturally relativistic, client‐oriented social workers (in Leicester).

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