engleski

(Mis)Understandings between young people and professionalsin residential care

Good-quality residential care requires continuous reflections from all participants – young people in care, professionals, scientists, and other stakeholders. A deeper understanding of all these perspectives, especially how young people and professionals perceive treatment, can bring important insights. Therefore, this research aimed to explore how young people and professionals perceive residential care. Research questions were focused on exploring the experience of care and its elements as well as recommendation for improvement. The qualitative approach was used. Data were collected through focus groups with young people living in two residential homes in Croatia and professionals working in these institutions. Results show that young people describe the experience in care in a generally negative way, highlighting inappropriate living conditions, lack of meaningful relationships with professionals, low level of participation in care, and presence of many different behavior problems. From a professional’s perspective, care is described as a wide range of interventions without any specific theoretical background. Professionals verbalize that working in residential care is challenging because of multiple and complex needs of children, insufficient number of staff and lack of cooperation with other institutions and community. Comparison between two perspectives shows that young people and professionals do not share a common understanding of care and interventions: young people tend to be more critical more explicit in their call for a meaningful relationships with professionals. On the other hand, professionals are more skeptical and place the responsibility for low quality of interventions on other stakeholders.

residential care, experience, adolescents, caregivers

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