Inside Home. La visita domiciliaria de trabajadores sociales como strategia de vinculación entre orden institucional y familia. Chile, 1925-1940

Abstract

The article analyzes the ‘home visit’ done by social workers in the early twentieth century, when professional schools of Social Work had been recently created in Chile. The article seeks to understand such visits as a way to give scientific status to a new profession, by handing a set of tools for collecting information about house holds and offering social skills to approach individuals and especially mothers. But at the same time, it was a sociocultural strategy to link families with the state and legitimate social policies as support tools, standardization and social protection in a kind of society that had left behind the traditional ties and promoted its replacement by a functional modern type of bond.