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This study investigated social orphans through narratives of young people with experiences of growing up in institutional care in Latvia. The study uses the life histories of participants to explore the phenomenon of social orphans. To date, narratives about the lived experiences of social orphans in Latvia have been told in the third person, as most studies have used methodologies that kept participants passive rather than active.
The research process in this study recorded 19 care leavers’ life experiences in detail and covered three main life phases: 1) Prior to living in care; 2)…
This study reports results concerning close embodied practices, involving touch, in early childhood care settings in Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data—video recordings of everyday practices in contexts of childcare—were collected during various phases of the pandemic.
The study demonstrates a broad range of uses of touch, by adults and children themselves in various age groups and for various social purposes. Touch as embodied intimacy was initiated by educators, and by children, both within their peer group and towards educators.
Touch served the purposes of embodied…
Caring for a young child exposed to early trauma, along with caregiving stress and heightened by the impact of lockdowns as a result of the COVID-19 response, may compromise the development of the parent-child relationship. Understanding a foster carer's attachment history and considering relational dynamics through an attachment lens may shed light on areas they need support in, to enhance their parenting capacity for vulnerable children.
The feasibility of collecting and coding observational data and attachment interviews of foster carers and their children, when conducted remotely…
When teaching in or around the subject of care-experienced young people, it is important for information to be presented in a way that not only creates an understanding of the prevalence of care experience but also emphasises the myriad of life challenges associated with experiences of being involved in the care system.
It is known that out of the 12 million children living in England, just under 400,000 (3%) are known to the social care system at any one time and just over 82,000 of these children are ‘looked after’, under the legal guardianship of local authorities in England.
It will…
Young people who age out of state care are at risk of a range of negative outcomes. In England, national data provides only five indicators of care leavers’ lives and there are no measures of how young people themselves feel about their transition to adulthood. To fill this gap a new survey to measure subjective wellbeing was coproduced with 31 care leavers. The survey was then distributed by 21 local authorities and completed by 1804 care leavers.
The responses revealed a steep decline in wellbeing after leaving care, a wide variation in care leavers’ wellbeing depending on the local…
The objective of this paper is to further the understanding of young people’s experiences of out-of-home care (OHC) in Sweden. The focus will be on the tension between negative and positive experiences of OHC, refracted through the concept of liminality. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 10 young people aged 15–22 (7 women, 3 men) with long-term contact with social services and psychiatric care. OHC can be experienced as a liminal space in both a negative and a positive sense.
It is negative when perceived as containment rather than meaningful treatment. It can also be…
This report draws 14 lessons from academic research on the effects of out-of-home care on subsequent criminality. Most of the studies references in this review of based in Sweden.
Research suggests a tradeoff between the quality of out-of-home care and future criminality. The report is part of the three-year SNS research project “Crime and Society.”
SNS hopes that the report will contribute to increasing our knowledge and initiating more discussions on how outof-home care for children and youths affects them and how to improve such care.
Care-experienced children and young people are more likely to experience poorer mental health relative to the general population. Some of the most highly cited literature in this area is becoming increasingly outdated, however, and as the gap between mental health service availability and provision is steadily growing, it is imperative that we understand the scale and nature of the mental health needs of this group. A systematic review of all literature published from the UK was conducted in March 2022 using APA PsycINFO, ASSIA, Cochrane Library, Medline, PubMed, Scopus, Social Policy and…
Abstract
Background
The mental health and well-being of care-experienced children and young people remains a concern. Despite a range of interventions, the existing evidence base is limited in scope, with a reliance on standalone outcome evaluations which limits understanding of how contextual factors influence implementation and acceptability. The care-experienced children and young people’s interventions to improve mental health and well-being outcomes systematic review (CHIMES) aimed to synthesise evidence of intervention theory, outcome, process and economic effectiveness. This…
Abstract:
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning (LGBTQþ) young people are overrepresented in out-of-home social care and face significant physical health, mental health and well-being inequalities compared with their non-LGBTQþ peers. Their residential care experiences have been missing from the knowledge base, with no prior in-depth published research in the UK. Theoretically informed by an intersectional minority stress framework and combining qualitative and co-production methodologies, this study produced a nuanced understanding of the residential care…