Tra rappresentazioni sociali e pratiche di accoglienza: uno studio di casi sulle dinamiche interazionali tra migranti forzati e operatori all’interno di un servizio di accoglienza italiano

This project is a case study conceived to observe the interactive practices acting inside an Italian reception service for forced migrants. The purpose of the research program was to investigate the contents of the Social Representation of a group of social workers working every day for the reception and settlement of asylum seekers and refugees, and how these contents were expressed in the practices of reception and social integration, in order to find a possible interrelation between different levels of analysis (Doise, 1982) - institutional, representational and interpersonal. The study has been divided into three phases: the first was developped using ethnographic methods; the second by semi-structured interviews and the third by observing meetings between service providers and forced migrants. The ethnographic phase has been essential to enter inside the culture of the observed group of eight providers and get to know rules and rituals of the service functioning. The eight providers have been interviewed through a semi-structured interview that explored their social representations around topics as Asylum Right, reception system, forced migrants and the experience of meeting migrant users inside the service. Six of the eight social workers participated in the third phase of the research, in which they were observed during 18 meetings with users of the service. The crossing between the qualitative data of the three phases has shown that the institutional and representational levels of analysis play an important role in directing the approach and the ways in which social workers relate to the users of their reception service. In particular, the strength of the institutional level, which involves the rules of the settlement project and the roles of the providers inside the service, seems to affect more intensely their practices in relation to the representational level of analysis.