Social Welfare Literacy: Processes of Interpretation and Negotiation to Optimise the Life Plans of Rehabilitants in Vocational Training Centres - a Qualitative Longitudinal Analysis

As with the BCI approach, cultural determinants and their consequences for explaining health conditions are gaining more and more acceptance in science and practice.The concept of health literacy can be integrated into these observations, which describes the competence of the individual to generate, understand and apply health information. Based on this concept and the work of Stahl et. al. (2021), we have developed the concept of social welfare literacy. This was designed, among other things, on the basis of empirical data collected in a qualitative longitudinal study with rehabilitants in vocational rehabilitation in so-called occupational training centers.

Within the system of vocational rehabilitation in Germany, the rehabilitants' courses of rehabilitation are usually very lengthy and complex, especially when rehabilitants enter a new occupational field due to disability or mental or psychosomatic chronic illness. They pass through various institutions of the welfare state and meet gatekeepers who advise, label, train and allocate resources. In the overall process, the increasingly complex realities of life and problem situations of those undergoing rehabilitation are translated into the respective institutional expectations and requirements. The concept of social welfare literacy is used to analyse the skills of those undergoing rehabilitation in order to help them find their way around the system of vocational rehabilitation and optimize their life plan.
Social welfare literacy refers to the economic, social and cultural resources of rehabilitators as well as to their abilities to find their way around the rehabilitation system and to articulate and assert their needs and demands. The focus is on biographically acquired knowledge and experiences with social bureaucracies as well as on performative competencies vis-à-vis the procedural workers. Depending on the resources and socio-moral orientations of the rehabilitants, they succeed in optimizing their life plan in different ways with the help of welfare state support.