Deconstructing doing well; what can we learn from care experienced young people in England, Denmark and Norway?
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2020-08-08Metadata
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Bakketeig. Deconstructing doing well; what can we learn from care experienced young people in England, Denmark and Norway?. Children and Youth Services Review. 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105333Abstract
This paper addresses the conceptualization of ‘outcomes’ for care experienced people through an in-depth longitudinal study of 75 young adults in Denmark, England
and Norway. ‘Outcome’ studies have played a crucial role in raising awareness of the risk of disadvantage that care experienced people face, across a variety of
domains including education and employment. These studies may have an unintended consequence, however, if care experienced people are predominantly viewed,
and studied, through a problem-focused lens. The danger is that policy and research neglects other – perhaps less readily measurable – aspects of experience,
including subjective understandings – what matters to care experienced people themselves. Our analyses are based on an in-depth qualitative longitudinal study,
which explored meanings of ‘doing well’ over time among care experienced people (aged 16–32), all of whom were ‘successful’ in relation to traditional indicators of
participation in education and/or employment (including voluntary work). Across countries, their accounts revealed the importance of attending to subjective and
dynamic understandings of ‘doing well’, and the significance of ordinary, mundane and ‘do-able’ lives. Participants’ narratives highlight aspects of doing well that
raise challenging questions about how traditional outcome indicators – and corresponding policy priorities – might better capture what young people themselves see
as important. A narrow interpretation of outcomes may lead to misrecognition of what it means to do well, and so to a stigmatizing ‘way of seeing’ care experienced
lives. A broader conceptualization of outcomes is necessary to recognize – and so to develop policy and services to support – the complex, dynamic relationality of
doing well.