Questão social: apreensão e intervenção no trabalho dos assistentes sociais

• Ano de defesa: 2008
• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, José Wesley
• Orientador(a): Maciel, Ana Lúcia Suárez
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Porto Alegre
• Palavras-chave em Português: SERVIÇO SOCIAL; ASSISTENTES SOCIAIS - ATUAÇÃO PROFISSIONAL; PROBLEMAS SOCIAIS
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/10923/5176

This dissertation discusses the connection between the theoretical-methodological, ethical-political and technical-operational knowledge in the professional intervention of social workers. Its main goal is to reveal how social workers, through the work processes, grasp the social question and intervene in it, in order to contribute to the improvement of the work and professional training of social workers. This study is relevant for social work in that it enables the mediation between theory and practice on the basis of the reality in which the profession is exercised, viz. in the becoming of the real, in a dialectical movement in which practice provides resources for the construction of theoretical knowledge with a view to implement the work processes and, at the same time, the teleological dimension guides professional action. The research that was carried out had a qualitative character. The techniques of semistructured interview and asystematic observation were use to collect information, and the technique of content analysis was employed for the analytical process. The subjects of the research project were six female social workers who work in the municipality of Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul, in various areas of professional activity. The interviews were conducted between June and August 2007. The method used to conduct the study is the dialectical-critical one, whose central categories are totality, historicity and contradiction. The study’s results show that those six social workers make use of the theoretical-methodological dimension in a fragile and inconsistent manner. There are heterogeneous views of the social question among them. They have difficulty in understanding it on the basis of its common genesis (capital-labor conflict) and its contradictory dimension (inequality vis-à-vis resistance).The interviewed social workers have an economicistic reductionistic understanding of the social question, since the latter is reduced to poverty, which makes it impossible to grasp the professional object in its totality. They resort to the intervention techniques without connection to the theory and appropriate the institutional object as if it were the professional object itself. The overload of professional roles they play in their institutional routines makes it difficult for them to undertake a theoretical reflection. Thus, the social workers experience alienation, as they are not able to understand that their practice is inserted in a work process that contains an object, means and a product. However, the products of the social workers’ activity exhibit a contradiction, for, in spite of their theoretical fragility, they are able to help strengthen the autonomy of the users of social services, favoring their awareness-raising, organization and participation in the process of building a less unequal society. The propositions made in this study include the need for more rigor in the adoption of the critical social theory in the process of professional training, the promotion of continued education for social workers and the fostering of dialog among the social workers in their entirety, thus overcoming the isolation between those devoted to teaching and research and those who work directly in the institutions that provide service to countless users. The professionals’ participation, their collective organization as a professional group and the acknowledgment of the theoretical-practical contradictions present in the activity of social workers are essential to build spaces of dialog and advancement.