engleski

Quality of Support and Capacity of Institutions for Children with Dissabilities – Perspective of Different Stakeholders Using Mixed Methodology

Children with disabilities placed in institutions for long-term care and protection in Croatia are very specific vulnerable population due to several serious contemporary professional and ethical issues. There have been many discussions in late time about quality of education and rehabilitation in institutions versus living in family home with periodically professional support. Actual social policy course toward changes, called “institutional transformation” have been opened more questions than ever about future for that children as well as confusion in understanding of new roles among current professionals in longterm residential care. The aim of this research was to analyse the quality of support for children with disability placed in institutions. Quality of support was measured through analysis of individual plans and individualized education and rehabilitation plans, number and profile of professionals that provided services, frequency of service provision, cooperation with families, dealing with challenging behaviour and perspective of professionals towards service provision and transformation of institutions. This presentation contains information from 24 interviews with directors of institutions, 280 personal documentation of children, 233 Quality of support questionnaires and 160 questionnaires for professionals. Methodology for understanding data collected for the purpose of answering this question(s) is mixed. Philosophical approach in undertaking qualitative part of research is phenomenology. Interviews are summarized, structured and analysed according to principle of Mc Craken (1988) for long interviews. All explanations are from perspective of directors of institutions. Documentation are analysed by using content analysing to describe quality of institutional support to children, as seen from the perspective of researchers. Data from questionnaire are analysed with quantitative tools. Desriptive statistics and analysis of differences between institutions and regions are used. The most important results are going to be presented by linking all perspectives and giving more clear view of current position that will inform making recommendations for needed changes.

Children with disabilities, long-term care and protection, institutional transformation

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