Authors

• Saarnio, Pekka (University of Tampere. Department of Social Policy and Social Work)

Keywords

alcoholism, childhood, drug abuse, occupational choice, personality, rehabilitation, social services, social workers

Abstract

The data are part of Substance Abuse Treatment series, which comprises datasets that can be used in both quantitative and qualitative research.

The questionnaire in this dataset was filled in by therapists working in inpatient treatment facilities in Western and Southern Finland. The respondents were both permanent employees and substitutes with a minimum of one year's experience in substance abuse treatment. The number of therapists participating in the study in each facility varied from four to 19.

The respondents were first asked which treatment method or approach they themselves mostly used and how important they thought some often used methods or approaches were. Opinions were probed on whether the respondents would prefer to work with members of one sex over the other. The respondents were asked whether they had experienced sexual violence or abuse, had been exposed to someone's alcohol or drug problem as a child and had been interested in helping people as a child. The respondents' religiosity, enthusiasm for their work and personal experiences of recovering from substance abuse were investigated.

Those respondents with a history of substance abuse were asked further questions. These covered the age at which they had begun substance abuse, whether they had used substances daily, experiences of poly-drug use, serious health problems caused by substance abuse, close family members' substance abuse, the respondents' hyperactivity or conduct disorders as a child, and whether they had been sentenced for violent crime during their substance abuse.

Background variables included, among others, the respondent's age, gender, marital status, education and job title.

During the study, the respondents were also asked to respond to vignette questions, the answers to which are available in a separate dataset (FSD2691).