Psychology and Social Services: constructing compromised practices

Abstract

Since the promulgation of the “Sistema Único da Assistência Social”, social services have become an important working field for psychologists. Most of academic papers and documents regarding this “new” field emphasize these professionals must be committed to social changes, nerveless they don´t make explicit what and how it should be done. In this paper, we aimed to talk about experiences that turn the (abstract) notion of social commitment into concrete professional practices. To do so, weekly visits were made to a housing service in which the researcher talked with its professionals about their everyday work and registered these talks in a field journal. This experience allowed us to say that the work of these psychologist involve a great variety of activities, many of them different from what we usually relate to this professional group.