Ability of social welfare professionals as users of information systems (IS) and their experiences of IS support for work

Authors

• Samuel Salovaara University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
• Sanna Hautala University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
• Marianne Silén University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23996/fjhw.110119

Keywords:

social welfare, information systems, user–computer interface, surveys and questionnaires

Abstract

The experiences of social welfare professionals with higher education are examined for the first time as part of the nationwide Monitoring and Evaluation of Social and Health IS Services (STePS 3.0) project. The aim is to provide information about the realisation of the goals defined for social welfare professionals in the Finnish eHealth and eSocial 2020 Strategy. The study asks how experienced and skilled social professionals are as the users of ISs, how ISs support the search and exchange of information by social welfare professionals and how well client ISs support the work of social welfare professionals.

The research material consists of the responses of 990 social welfare professionals who responded to the electronic questionnaire in September–October 2020 and who worked in the public, private or third sector in a variety of social welfare positions. The results show that social welfare professionals with a higher education are experienced users of ISs, but the support provided by the systems for work is somewhat weak. Social welfare professionals working in the public sector assessed the support provided by ISs for work more critically than those individuals in other sectors. ISs are utilised as the main source of client information in information retrieval, but old-fashioned and information security-poor methods of information retrieval are still used. The social welfare client data archive is not yet widely utilised in the social welfare sector in information retrieval. The study highlights the need to identify the barriers to the utilisation of ISs and to take better account of the interactional and relational aspects of social welfare practices and the needs of different occupational tasks in the development of ISs so that they can better support social welfare professionals in their daily work.