Direct Scribing the Narratives of Street Youth: How Contexts and Processes in Which Youth Speak Shape Their Voices
Social workers increasingly support giving “voice” to children and youth, enabling them to have their perspectives taken into account in matters affecting them. This stance is connected to an international movement that gained force when the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), affirming children’s rights to freely express their views and participate in procedures affecting them. Since then thousands of initiatives in research and practice have emerged around the globe, creating spaces for children’s voices, both within and outside social work. However, as efforts to “give voice” to young people have developed, so has critical awareness of the challenges that attend efforts to represent children’s opinions and experiences. Scholarship that presents children’s voices as “authentic” underestimates the extent to which the power-laden contexts in which young people speak shape their utterances.
Methods:
This research centers on the question of how relations of power in research and practice shape the voices of homeless youth in special education. Data is drawn from narratives of 16 street youth in special education, recruited from a large drop-in center in Toronto. The method of ‘direct scribing’ used to gather data allows youth to dictate their “stories” while the researcher transcribes them on a computer in real time as the interviewee watches, revises and edits the narratives over subsequent sessions. This method shifts power in the interaction to the interviewee and cedes the authority for the creation of the “record” to participants who create new narratives and recover from accounts that others have told about them. Narrative analysis is used to examine how these youth experienced social structures that impinged on their lives, how they describe attempts to influence those structures, and how the method of direct scribing affects the stories that the narrators tell.
Results:
In addition to a critical examination of how direct scribing affects youth participation in research, the researchers will identify three story structures, beginning with “epiphanies,” or accounts of transformative moments that left their mark on the lives of the narrators, including moments in which they sought and often failed to influence contexts such as home, schools, and classrooms. Secondly, stories of “resistance” are identified where young people react to special education labels and identities assigned to them. Finally, accounts of “exits” are identified when youth take control over life decisions, often through stigmatized or criminalized activities including dropping out, running away, committing self-harm, or involvement with substance abuse or prostitution.
Implications:
Practitioners and policy-makers lack knowledge of how children and youth view policies and services such as special education, designed to meet their needs. There are challenges related to soliciting children’s voices in contexts dominated by adults in authority – homes, classrooms, IEPs, courtrooms, and research – and yet decisions about children’s best interests emerge from these contexts. The ability of research to give voice to young people is more complex than it is made out to be, hence initiatives such as direct scribing that offer power to youth should be fostered and assessed.