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SIGNIFICANT FACTORS FOR THE PROCESS OF ASSESSMENT OF VULNERABLE FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN - A QUALITATIVE STUDY

Lenka Kvasnakova, Beata Balogova

Abstract

The study deals with the problem of the assessment of the living situation in vulnerable families with children within the system of social-legal protection of children in the current conditions of Slovakia. The basic starting position is to answer the question of how to assess such vulnerable family and at the same time protect minors from the negative impacts of existing threats and their consequences. It is with an emphasis on how to deal with the dilemma of maintaining the autonomy of the family while ensuring protection of the rights of the child and individual family members. The authors answer this question by means of the results of the qualitative case study of the process of assessment vulnerable families with children where social workers in the Department of Social-Legal Protection of Children and Social Custody of eastern Slovakia were interviewed (DSLPC as a supporting body of social-legal protection in Slovakia) with the aim to identify significant factors in assessment of vulnerable families. The context of social functioning and socio-ecological approach, when working with clients, is the basic theoretical starting point of the assessment. The merits of problem-solving process is related to the publicized cases in Slovakia and the authors see its solution on both theoretical and practical level of social worker performance, emphasizing that the right quality assessment is a prerequisite for intervention measures in relation to the customer. Initial concept is to analyze the current state of social-legal protection of the family in Slovakia, where the central theme is undoubtedly the context of assessment of vulnerable families, especially on its multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional level. In the next section the authors present the scheme of identified factors as one of the basal outputs in considering the social workers, significant for the process of assessing families. An important finding was that examined social workers largely focus on gathering facts about the life situation of the family (or descriptive labelling of the situation of the family), which serve as a basis for developing analyses / anamneses. The negative is that the subsequent process of interpretation of analyzed data and its assessment are implemented only minimally (or not implemented at all). This leads to a situation where the process of assessment and effective intervention is to be moved to other professionals. In order to avoid this negative phenomenon, resulting effects of theoretical - empirical studies are designed to strategies and perspectives of possible development of the assessment within the context of social-legal protection and curatorship in Slovakia and accentuate the need to develop standardized procedures of assessment.

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