A Subject-Oriented Perspective on Social Work Services: Foster Care Institutions for Children and Youth As "Spaces of Particularity"

Background and Purpose:

Everyday life in residential social work facilities, such as youth or groups homes, generally occurs in an institutionally framed sphere, in a "field of tension between public and private" (Meuth 2021, p. 443). This can be accompanied by specific particularity and damages for the children and youth living there (e.g., van Rießen/Aghamiri 2023; Gundrum/Oelerich 2021). In particular, children's and youth' rights are repeatedly disregarded in the context of public youth welfare. Thus, in the tension between help and control, residential groups become "spaces of particularity" from the perspective of the young people living there.

Methods:

The research perspective of social pedagogical user research offers a possibility to realize the rights of children and youth to their own perspective in the context of organized help. The relationships between institutionalized social work housing, e.g., group homes, and those who must use these facilities can be viewed variously. In our contribution we would like to do this from the perspective of young people themselves. Therefore, we rely on social pedagogical user research (Oelerich/Schaarschuch 2005), which focuses on answering the question of benefits of social work services, both in terms of content and procedural orientation, from the perspective of the users. By asking about the benefits of social work from the perspective of children and youth, the non-benefits of social work or the harms caused by youth welfare services work - and this is intentional! – are also brought into focus. For this purpose, guided interviews, which students of social work collected for their master thesis, contextualized by the socio-pedagogical user research, were secondarily analyzed. The interviews focused on adolescents' experiences with foster care institutions for children and youth. In conducting the interviews, the ethical guidelines of the German Society for Social Work e. V. were observed. The interviews were anonymized and evaluated inductively using qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2015).

Findings & Conclusion:

Looking at the perspective of young people themselves, harms and particularities that arise in the context of the use of foster care institutions become visible (contributions in van Rießen/Jepkens 2020; van Rießen/Aghamiri 2023; Gundrum/Oelerich 2021). In the contribution, the focus will be on "Harm as a consequence of non-participation" and "foster care institutions as a space of particularity". Thus, it will become clear which harms children and youth can experience in foster care institutions - as a pedagogically framed place. The perspective of social pedagogical user research thus connects to an emancipatory-oriented further development of social work. The analyses reveal whether and under which conditions the services of social work represent an option through which service users can lead a more self-determined and successful life (Schaarschuch 2008). Hence, from this perspective, the criterion for evaluating social work services is their usefulness for one's own life, which can only be answered by the users themselves.