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Socialsekreterare och humor - funktioner och normativa gränsdragningar

Antreski, Sofia LU and Jansson, Cecilia LU (2016) SOPA63 20161
School of Social Work
Abstract
Humor is a big part of people's everyday life and social interactions, although we don’t consider humor and social work as a natural combination. We have interviewed Swedish social workers and asked them about their perspective on humor and how they use it in their work. We analyzed the material using superiority theory and the dramaturgical perspective to find which functions and norms they related to humor. So what do social workers think is appropriate to joke about? The answers differ, but we discovered that it depends a lot on the relationship and the situation. It seems to be appropriate to joke about most things if you have a good relationship to the receiver of the joke, like the client or the colleagues. We found that social... (More)
Humor is a big part of people's everyday life and social interactions, although we don’t consider humor and social work as a natural combination. We have interviewed Swedish social workers and asked them about their perspective on humor and how they use it in their work. We analyzed the material using superiority theory and the dramaturgical perspective to find which functions and norms they related to humor. So what do social workers think is appropriate to joke about? The answers differ, but we discovered that it depends a lot on the relationship and the situation. It seems to be appropriate to joke about most things if you have a good relationship to the receiver of the joke, like the client or the colleagues. We found that social workers think humor is important in their work, mainly for building relationships, coping with emotions and as a way of communicating. But we also present some negative effects that humor can have, like when the joke doesn’t get through to the other person or when it can be excluding. We believe that we need to discuss humor and social work more to understand the different outcomes of it. In order to accomplish this we need to reflect over our professional view on humor and social work. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Antreski, Sofia LU and Jansson, Cecilia LU
supervisor
organization
course
SOPA63 20161
year
type
M2 - Bachelor Degree
subject
keywords
Humor, humor functions, social workers, superiority theory, dramaturgy, Goffman, socialsekreterare, överlägsenhetsteori, dramaturgiskt perspektiv
language
Swedish
id
8880303
date added to LUP
2016-06-21 09:58:13
date last changed
2016-06-21 09:58:13
@misc{8880303,
  abstract     = {{Humor is a big part of people's everyday life and social interactions, although we don’t consider humor and social work as a natural combination. We have interviewed Swedish social workers and asked them about their perspective on humor and how they use it in their work. We analyzed the material using superiority theory and the dramaturgical perspective to find which functions and norms they related to humor. So what do social workers think is appropriate to joke about? The answers differ, but we discovered that it depends a lot on the relationship and the situation. It seems to be appropriate to joke about most things if you have a good relationship to the receiver of the joke, like the client or the colleagues. We found that social workers think humor is important in their work, mainly for building relationships, coping with emotions and as a way of communicating. But we also present some negative effects that humor can have, like when the joke doesn’t get through to the other person or when it can be excluding. We believe that we need to discuss humor and social work more to understand the different outcomes of it. In order to accomplish this we need to reflect over our professional view on humor and social work.}},
  author       = {{Antreski, Sofia and Jansson, Cecilia}},
  language     = {{swe}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Socialsekreterare och humor - funktioner och normativa gränsdragningar}},
  year         = {{2016}},
}