Project information
Project manager
Sofia Enell
Other project members
Lotta Agevall Gross, Linnaeus University
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University; VoB-SYD; Gryning vård & Cura
Financier
Forskningsrådet för hälsa, arbetsliv och välfärd (FORTE), Tillämpad välfärdsforskning 2025
Timetable
1 July 2025–1 June 2030
Subject
Social Work (Department of Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences)
More about the project
Residential care (RC ) concerns about 6000 young people each year and is a legislated intervention since 1902. The purpose is to provide care and lasting change for the residents. Over the years, the content of care has developed to a more therapeutic approach.
Despite the history of RC and the increasing focus on treatment, the possibility to achieve positive change is disputed. The isolation from the rest of society and the limited time in RC suggests that any changes that may occur during the placement might not be sustained.
There are also indicators of ‘deviancy training’ that may lead to a more negative development. Previous research of RC has been focused on secure care which means we lack knowledge of what happens in open RC , the most common form of RC in Sweden.
In the current study, the underlying conditions for RC to be able to serve as a place for change, based on the experiences of the young people residing there and the staff working there is explored. We want to study which changes that are desirable and possible to implement within the framework of RC and the conditions to make these changes persist after placement and in other contexts.
The overall aim is to highlight and deepen the understanding of RC and their possibilities and limitations as places for positive change, based on the perspectives and everyday lives of the young people and staff.
The study comprises of two sub-studies. In the first sub-study, we focus on young people’s understandings of life before placement, the placement itself, and everyday life at the residential setting as well as life after placement.
The second sub-study examines the staff's perspectives on the young people, descriptions of the young people's identified needs, staff's thoughts on treatment, and how they work daily to bring about change. The study will be carried out in collaboration with three municipality owned care companies. We will adopt a qualitative research approach, combining a time-geographical method by activity diaries with qualitative interviews. In the analysis we make use of the time-geographical concepts of constraints (capacity constraints, authority constraints, coupling constraints) that shape both the young people’s everyday life at RC and the staff’s work and discretion. There is a need of greater transparency of everyday life in RC and this study may provide better understanding of the place for the involved and for how these settings are understood and integrated in society.
