Der Digitalisierungsdiskurs in der Sozialen Arbeit

Digitalization is becoming increasingly more important in the practice and science of social work. The specifics of the academic discourse on digitalization are also repeatedly discussed and published, although an empirical analysis has yet to be conducted. In order to empirically substantiate the previous findings and assumptions, a quantitative text analysis is used in this paper to automatically analyze 21,242 scientific reviews from the field of social work and 2 different discourse strands emerge. The development of the thematization of (1) media education has shown a tendency to decline since 2000, while topics relating to (2) digitalization are steadily increasing, with an exponential growth observed since 2016. In a second step, the topic-specific reviews are analyzed in more detail, revealing different special discourses at the microlevel (digitality and help), mesolevel (digitality and organization) and macrolevel (digitality and society). Based on the analysis a basic introduction to quantitative text analysis (latent Dirichlet allocation) is given and its potential and limitations for social work are discussed.