Helping, mediating, and gaining recognition: The everyday identity work of Romanian health social workers

Abstract

Health social work is a field with challenges, opportunities, and ways of professing social work that may vary between different national contexts. In this article, we look at how Romanian health social workers construct their professional identity through their everyday identity work. Drawing on a qualitative study based on interviews with 21 health social workers working in various organizational contexts, we analyze what health social workers say they do and how this shapes their self-conception as professionals. Four main themes emerged from participants' descriptions: being a helping professional, being a mediator, gaining recognition, and contending with limits. Through these themes, participants articulated the everyday struggles and satisfactions specific to working as recently recognized professionals in Romanian health and welfare systems not always supportive of their work.

Factors of Social Work Students’ Professional Identity Significance during Professional Training

“…The professional identity of social workers is the result of their identification with social work and its norms, with the professional community of social workers, with its authoritative representatives, with the status of a social worker in society. The significance of a social worker's professional identity is determined by its importance among other types of professional and social identity (Webb, 2017), recognition of social work in the country (Ciocănel et al, 2018).…”

The COVID-19 pandemic and everyday life: The relations of lockdown, social distancing, face masking, discreet salutation and hand hygiene in Nigeria

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has once again affirmed the position that actors construct and reconstruct their social beings through the meanings they construct out of social interactions and reality (Harvey 2016, Ciocănel, Lazăr, Munch, et al, 2018. Human beings have experienced bouts of the corona virus strikes from time immemorial.…”

“…Пандемија COVID-19 још једном је потврдила став да актери граде и обнављају своје друштвено биће кроз значења која конструишу на основу друштвених интеракција и стварности (Harvey 2016, Ciocănel, Lazăr, Munch, et al, 2018. Људска бића још од давнина доживљавају налете коронавируса.…”