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Summary
This dissertation is about social work in residential care in Norway, based on three sub-studies, with different perspectives on the possibilities of developing relationships between the adolescents and employees. The three datasets are: qualitative interviews with adolescents, recordings of employees' discussions with each other, and institutional plans from residential care institutions of today, the 1850s and 1950s. In different ways, the analyses of the three datasets point out conditions and discourses characterising relational practices between adolescents and employees. The overall thesis question is: How is the space to develop relationships between adolescents and employees in residential care?
The dissertation’s post-structuralist position implies a rejection of finding the core of a phenomenon as possible, with a shift to directing the research towards what appears to be real for involved parties. With this starting point, the dissertation explores what appears to be possibilities for developing recognising relationships between adolescents and employees, by focusing on how plans, adolescents and employees communicate about relational practices and the everyday life in residential care.
The first article
The three sub-studies have resulted in three articles based on their respective data sets. The first article (Sommerfeldt, 2019) is based on analyses of institutional plans from the present, seen in the light of plans from around 1850 and 1950, inspired by Foucault's genealogical analysis (Foucault, 2001; Villadsen, 2005, 2006, 2007). The article shows how subject positionings of the child as an injured, but at the same time as a child with rights, point at specific practices, and in this way create conditions for developing relationships between adolescents and employees.
The second article
The second article (Sommerfeldt, 2022) is based on qualitative interviews with adolescents living in residential care at the time of the interview. I explored the adolescents' narratives of everyday life in residential care and about their relationships with the staff. In the analysis I apply Goffman's (2009) perspectives on stigma and Honneth's (2007) theorizations of recognition for a deeper understanding of the adolescents’ narratives. The theoretical perspectives contributed to highlighting what is at stake in the adolescents’ narratives on their relationships with the employees. Furthermore, how the risk of stigmatizing processes implies consequences for the young people's self-understanding, which can be remedied by developing recognising relationships with the employees.
The third article
The third article (Sommerfeldt, 2020) is based on analyses of audio recordings of employees’ discussions at child welfare institutions. The article explores how employees articulate social work in their discussions related to their work with one specific youth. The analyses explored what could be disposing the employees' reflections and showed that the dispositive «the autonomous child» was a transverse logic: in the employees' practices, the residential care as an institution and in social work as knowledge. The article shows how particular understandings of the autonomy of the child points at specific ways of talking about the child and about possible interventions.
Contributions
Residential care are much-debated institutions of great public interest, which emphasises the importance of offering good care to its residents. In different ways, the three articles of this dissertation show the complexity of factors in residential care, in which challenges the space to develop relationships between adolescents and employees. The dissertation contributes to knowledge on how adolescents and the employees in residential care develop relationships. Recognition, a central component and value of social work, between young people and employees is possible, and does take place, but it requires a special awareness of mechanisms that might limit the possibilities of developing such relationships.
