Information and communication technologies have significantly transformed the way advanced societies interact, produce, deliver services and consume resources. All walks of life are now touched by these technologies. However, compared to other areas of society, digital penetration is much lower in the development of and access to social services. The main objective of this paper was to find out what technological devices are used, how they are used and the way citizens interact with public bodies using technology to deliver social services. This has been part of a wider project on innovation in social services using participative methodologies centred on the development of local Hubs. The findings reveal a digital divide in technology-enabled access to social services that excludes the very people most in need of benefits and support.

The metaverse will have a direct impact on the way we relate to each other as. The interest of the young population explains the extent to which this new developing technological paradigm is already present in our society, generating environments where people will feel part of them and where interactions will be more authentic, immersive, and it remains to be seen whether these relationships will also be more inclusive. The article identifies these challenges through a literature review, making a categorical comparison with the professional competences of social work drawn from the professional codes of standards and competences. A qualitative analysis has been carried out to identify those competences that may be affected by one or more social challenges arising from the popularisation of the metaverse. It presents important challenges for social work, such as changes in community, governance and individual behaviour, as well as implications for ethics, privacy and the way we understand social intervention that require an epistemological, methodological and practical debate in the profession, as yet unpublished, to adapt to this new socio-virtual dimension in which millions of people have already settled. Finally, v-social work is proposed as a new professional field with specific competences.

The state of alarm caused by Covid-19 has mobilised the population’s digital social participation in social networks. Likewise, the relevance acquired by Social Services as a support for the social and health crisis has generated an unprecedented social debate on Twitter about the reality of these services in Spain. The analysis of this phenomenon is the focus of the present article, in which the tweets on Social Services and Covid-19 published during the confinement have been analysed using the qualitative analysis software Atlas.Ti. The results show the precariousness of social services and that a change in the management and financing model of these services is required to guarantee benefits and satisfy fundamental social rights.

Este artículo se centra en el estudio de los mensajes emitidos en la red social Twitter en torno a los tópicos asociados a los servicios sociales, tanto en el discurso político como en las aportaciones de la ciudadanía. Se ha trabajado con una muestra de 4.326 tuits generados en los años 2015-2018 del tópico “servicios sociales”, realizando un análisis cualitativo en Atlas.ti 8 previa codificación del contenido de los mensajes al objeto de analizar las relaciones y redes entre los códigos generados. El objetivo de este estudio es conocer las percepciones sobre los servicios sociales de los diferentes agentes que participan en Twitter y analizar los discursos, a fin de definir las temáticas prioritarias que abarcan el ideario sobre servicios sociales de los perfiles que participan activamente en dicha red social. En los resultados se observa que los/as usuarios/as utilizan Twitter fundamentalmente para una comunicación informal, centrada en mensajes de difusión, denuncias y valoraciones positivas para darles mayor visibilidad e impacto. Además, de la relación entre los tuits publicados y los partidos políticos más representativos a nivel nacional se desprende que el uso de Twitter tiene enfoques diferentes según cada fuerza política.

Efficient political decisions are needed to improve agricultural sustainability in many local areas. This article presents a way to use causal network analysis methodology to inform decisions for sustainable agricultural systems. High-risk (unsustainable) agriculture has developed in 42 southern European municipalities where various social, economic and environmental impacts threaten the local rural way of life. Our epistemological starting point is the complexity and multidimensionality of socioenvironmental systems. Within the context of an impact assessment, causal network analysis is used to show that social nodes are important, which suggests that efficient political intervention for these nodes should initiate the necessary changes.