"I Was Born, but What For…” Research about the Deep Level of Children’s Best Interest for Bridge Youth’s and Staff’s Mental Representations

Zsolt Balazs Major
Psychology, Bokréta Children's Home Center
Social Communication Doctoral School, Corvinus University of Budapest

Experiences from staff trainings show that what colleagues think about children’s needs can differ from how children evaluate staff’s efforts. It can inhibit staff’s proper reactions.

Our qualitative research’s design holds the aim to increase the efficacy of staff’s actions.

By content analysis of retrospective narrative interviews taken with care leavers, we identify that “mediums” – adapting Niklas Luhmann’s System Theory’s concept – what really matters for youth living in children’s homes. Analyzing further focus groups’ contents we define the “parameters” of these mediums. Findings are comparable with staff’s mental representations – through focus groups’ and surveys’ data’s analysis. Results can be feedbacked to practice by new training programs – with concentrate focus on ensuring professional’s deep understanding. Efficacy research of these trainings are part of the project.

First results show that “phisical and emotional safe”, “be important to someone”, “freedom”, "being expert", “right/reason to be alive” are the crucial “mediums”. Some findings face previous usual professional standards: e.g. use of “private resources” – time spent over official working hour, offer of personal matter as gift, etc. – means to youths that they are “important to someone else”. Implementation of it however is challenge.

This paper presents main findings and possible developments at the current phase of the research.