New insights on motives for choosing social work as a career: answers from students and newly qualified social workers

This study examines the motives behind the choice of social work as a career, and using the vocabulary of motives and folk logic as supporting theoretical concepts looks at how these motives can be understood. The study draws on data collected in Sweden through a questionnaire administrated to 583 newly qualified social workers and from written descriptions by 295 first-term social work students. The results show that there are several motives for undertaking social work as a career: altruistic ones, professional strategic ones, motives founded in personal experiences, and motives related to the individual's personal characteristics. The last-mentioned motive is a new discovery in research, while the others have been well established for some time.