Be prepared and do the best you can: a focus group study with staff on the care environment at Swedish secure youth homes

PURPOSE

This study examined staff members' experiences of the institutional care environment within secure youth homes.

METHODS

Data were collected through three focus group discussions with 17 staff members at two secure youth homes. Subsequently, a thematic analysis was conducted.

RESULTS

The analysis indicated two main themes: risk management and damage control in a restricted environment and compensating and reconstructing ordinariness-trying to make the best of it; each theme had three subthemes. The care environment seems to be experienced by staff as characterized by conflicting demands, thus constituting a gap between needs and what is possible to achieve-a balancing act that constitutes a constant struggle.

CONCLUSIONS

The staff members' constant struggle could be interpreted as conflicting moral and instrumental demands; they know what the youths need, but the environment of the secure youth homes demands the decorous behaviour of sociomaterial control practices-rather than care practices.

Space and place for health and care

Purpose: This discussion paper aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the state of the art of research engaged with conceptual matters of space and place for health and care. Method: The authors, who represent a variety of academic disciplines, discuss and demonstrate the conceptual recognition of space and place in research in health and caring sciences building upon own work and experience. Results: To explore the concepts of space and place for health and care is a research pursuit of utmost importance, and should be made through transdisciplinary research collaborations, whereby spatial theories from various disciplines could be communicated to cultivate truly novel and well-informed research. Furthermore, engaging with relational and topological perceptions of space and place poses methodological challenges to overcome in future research on health and care. Conclusions: We argue that there is a need for accelerating spatially informed research on health and care that is informed by current theories and perspectives on space and place, and transdisciplinary research collaborations are a means to achieving this.

"If you don't behave, you're in real shit, you don't get outside the doors"-a phenomenological hermeneutic study of adolescents' lived experiences of the socio-spatial environment of involuntary institutional care

In Sweden, according to law, adolescents with extensive psychosocial problems, substance abuse or criminal behaviour can be cared for in institutions. The two-fold aim of these institutions (to rehabilitate and incarcerate) puts special demands to their socio-spatial context.

Purpose: To elucidate adolescents’ lived experiences of the socio-spatial environment at special youth homes run by the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care (SiS) in Sweden.

Methods: Data collected through Photovoice and analysed employing a phenomenological hermeneutical method. Fourteen adolescents (age 15–19) were asked to photograph their environment, and this was followed up by in-depth interviews.

Results: Two themes emerged from the material: the dense walls of institutional life and create and capture the caring space. The socio-spatial environment can be seen as an additional “other” that distances the adolescents and the staff from one another. Negotiating with their behaviour, the adolescents strive to present themselves as worthy of increased degrees of freedom and ultimately access to the desired outside life.

Conclusions: In an institutional setting dominated by a security and criminal justice logic, words appear to have less impact than the environment. The adolescents appear to understand themselves through the socio-spatial other, causing reinforced feelings of social exclusion.