Marie Spilackova

The development of social work as a scientific branch and the development of the theories and methods are unthinkable without research activities. There is a long-established tradition of research in the social field in the Czech Republic. The realization of research scientific activities is related mainly to universities. The objective of this contribution is to present the development and current state of research in social work in the field of empirical and historical research in the Czech Republic.

The aim of this text is to reflect the housing crisis in the Czech lands in the years 1918–1948 on the background of the work of social workers. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter, social workers were also engaged in the issue of housing. While administering housing care, social workers employed professional methods, which were applied during the analysed period. These methods reflected the needs of the residents while efficiently integrating professional knowledge and skills gained over the course of social work education. Both housing policy and the related housing care underwent intensive development. This paper focuses on the changes in the area of housing policy in the said period while considering the continuous development of social work, as well as social work methods, courses offered to social workers, and the presentation of their work in professional journals published at the time.

ABSTRACT The imagined community of social workers provides a collective resemblance to the individual construction of the correctness of performance of social work. This paper aims to understand the influence of the imagined community and its shared social worker’s metanarrative on the ‘correctness’ of social work in social and legal protection of children in Czechia. The data were created through a qualitative research strategy, more specifically through sets of three repeated interviews with eight well-experienced social workers from the office of social and legal protection of children. The data were analyzed using the constructivist grounded theory by Charmaz. The research conceived six roles of the imagined community that fulfill specific functions, plus two functions for which the informants did not create any specific roles of imagined community; making these functions in the informants’ view unfulfilled. Specifically, this concerned self-organizing capacity as well as activation and protection of a social worker. The generated data are further discussed in the context of education and training designed for social workers.

Cross-border cooperation has been considered an essential element in the development of professional social work and its education since its beginnings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many social work pioneers promoted the principles of peace, war relief, human rights and international cooperation in dealing with social problems. In Central Europe, there was on the one hand an acceptance of diversity and different national traditions, and on the other hand a series of integration activities aimed at developing transnational common standards. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Alice Masaryková from Czechoslovakia and Helena Radlińska from Poland had been central figures in the professionalization of social work and social pedagogy in Central Europe. While Alice based social work mainly on sociology, Helena based it on social pedagogy. The aim of this article is to identify and search for the specifics and diversity of historical development and subsequent internation...