IS THERE A FIELD OF SOCIAL-WORK - TRAINEES EVALUATING SOCIAL-PROBLEMSAND SOCIAL-WORK

My aim was to study the experiences and priorities of two age groups o f social work students practicing in client-centered social work. This article is based on the research on rationality and language games in social work. The target groups of the research project as a whole wer e the actors: the heads and social workers or activists in public soci al welfare and health care agencies and institutions and in voluntary associations and action groups, and finally, two subsequent classes of students from a school of social work, during their practicing period s. This article concentrates on the trainees. At first, the trainees w rote essays and kept diaries. Secondly, they marked their standings on graphs visualizing different types of information contents and social relation structures. Thirdly, they made their choices of reasons for and solutions to social problems on a problem wheel. The trainees' stu dy, using different data gathering techniques, partly confirms the res ults of the research of the other actor groups, in which the data were derived using questionnaires and interviews. The trainees' study show s variation in the respondents' priorities within and between specifie d social problem categories. Qualitatively analyzed, however, the char acterizations of social work, both those who currently act in and thos e aiming to enter this field, resemble one another.