The Effects of Skill Training on Social Workers' Professional Competences in Norway: Results of a Cluster-Randomised Study.

Using a cluster-randomised design, this study analyses the effects of a government-administered skill training programme for social workers in Norway. The training programme aims to improve social workers' professional competences by enhancing and systematising follow-up work directed towards longer-term unemployed clients in the following areas: encountering the user, system-oriented efforts and administrative work. The main tools and techniques of the programme are based on motivational interviewing and appreciative inquiry.

Dialogical communication and empowering social work practice.

How to succeed in facilitating for empowering processes within social work practice is a central topic in both theoretical discussions and regarding its principles in practice. With a particular focus on how dialogical communication can play a part in order to practice empowering social work, through this text the author frames HUSK as a project facilitating the underpinning humanistic approaches in social work. Dialogical communication and its philosophical base is presented and recognized as a means to achieve empowering social work as well as highlighting the importance of the humanistic approach.

Service users' self-narratives on their journey from shame to pride: tales of transition.

As part of a course on changing attitudes developed by KREM, a Norwegian service user organization, narratives are used to explore and understand identity formation. The process is based on the role of shame in the lives of those whose life experiences lead to a reliance on government social benefits to sustain themselves. Shame is identified as an obstacle that affects everyday life and undermines one's capacity to take actions that can lead to and support self-sufficiency.