INVOLVEMENT AND THE EMPOWERMENT OF USERS DURING THE FIELD PLACEMENTS OF SOCIAL WORK STUDENTS

The article presents the results of an evaluative research conducted in 2005, related to held placements of second year social work students as seen from the social service user perspective. The aim of this evaluative research was to gain insight into the perception of the held placement programme from the perspective of service users as well as to include them in the process of programme evaluation, thus opening additional possibilities of the cooperative creation of the programme. The objective was to discover how social service users - experience experts, perceive the held placement programme. More precisely, the objective was to gain insight into the users' motivation for the participation in the programme, into their perception of the content and the course of the placement as well as into their recommendations for the improvement of the programme. The results reveal the social service users' perception of their role in the education of social workers but they also show that the users "have already been included" in the process due to the fact that they represent the most relevant source of information regarding themselves and their needs. The results are binding for the teachers since the users' right to inclusion means they have the right to equal position in negotiations, agreements and interventions as well as equal possibility of analysis from their own perspective. In that sense, authors suggest certain guidelines based on the research results which they used in further cooperative creation of the field placement programme and education of social workers in general.