Abstract

Professional supervision is a process aimed at supporting social worker's professional identity and improving the quality of his/her job. This is a very important opportunity for social worker because it concerns maintenance and development of knowledge, skills and ethical attitudes that are fundamental to pursue the professional objectives, and it allows to deal with professional stress situations. Professional supervision is a very debated topic in the international literature on social work and many studies have analyzed its theoretical and operational features. However, this has not happened in Italy, probably also because of the limited diffusion of professional supervision in our country. This essay's aims are: to describe professional supervision's topics through a presentation of its main aspects; to reconstruct scientific debate on this subject in recent years in Italy; to summarize main research evidences on professional supervision's diffusion and characteristics in Italy; to present the results of a case study conducted on social workers of Youth Criminal Justice System to verify whether the national framework is confirmed in this context.