Publication year
2017
Citation Title
Rules or no rules? Three strategies for engagement with young people in mandated services.
Journal Name
Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal
Journal Volume
34
Issue Number
3
Page Numbers
259-267
DOI
10.1007/s10560-016-0456-2
Summary
Relationships between at-risk youth and their mandated service professionals can be supportive, challenging, or both. This study examined youth's experiences with their mandated service professionals to explore what behaviors of professionals led to youth's experience of support and engagement. Results indicate that there is a spectrum of behaviors and roles which professionals can take that lead to successful relationships.
Key Findings
Three different roles were discovered that professionals typically embodied: informal supporter, administrator, and caregiver; each role served a function.
Informal supporters were more friend-like and often did not enforce rules, and youth spoke most positively about these professionals.
Administrators typically enforced rules and did little relationship-building, and youth consistently spoke poorly of the way these rules were enforced, even when it was clearly for their safety (e.g., lockdown of a correctional unit when a knife was missing from the kitchen).
Caregivers enforced rules in flexible ways that allowed some manner of negotiation, and youth reported appreciating the flexibility, though often still resisted the rules.
Implications for Military Professionals
Develop flexible rules, whenever possible, in order to facilitate relationship-building with youth
Collaborate with other professionals to determine appropriate application of rules that mirrors the experience of non-service-receiving youth as closely as possible
Implications for Program Leaders
Partner with youth to develop rules with their input whenever possible
Engage youth in workshops that aim to improve communication skills with their professional service providers
Implications for Policy Makers
Promote the development of structures within youth services that allow flexibility of rules when appropriate
Recommend partnerships between various youth service agencies to facilitate consistent enforcement of rules when multiple service agencies work with the same youth
Methods
Youth were selected to participate from a larger study examining risk and resilience in youth receiving services such as child welfare, mental health, juvenile corrections, alternative education, and community-based programs for youth at risk.
Youth with the most extreme scores on risk and resilience measures (i.e., both high risk/high resilience and high risk/low resilience youth) were invited to participate in interviews for this study. At least two males and two females were invited to participate from each site that referred participants.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted by trained research assistants and the interview guide changed over time as the interviews progressed and themes were gathered.
Interviews were coded by research assistants individually and discussed as a group.
Participants
Participants were 61 youth (27 female, 34 male).
Youth were 12-19 years old (M=16 years, SD = 1.75 years). No additional demographic information was provided.
Youth qualified to participate if they were currently receiving one service and had received at least one additional service in the past six months.
Limitations
Selected participants (i.e., those at the extremes of risk and resilience) may differ from youth moderate on risk and resilience in their experiences or responses, which may influence findings.
No race/ethnicity or socioeconomic data were provided, and depending on sample demographics the results may differ from other populations; therefore, generalizability is unknown.
Potential participants who declined to participate may have differed from those who did participate, limiting validity.
Avenues for Future Research
Examine whether professionals fall into one category consistently or switch roles over time or depending on circumstances
Discover how professionals whose behavior places them in certain categories experience their relationships with the youth they serve
Explore whether youth report of relationship strength with their professionals results in more positive outcomes for those youth
Focus
Civilian
Target Population
Population Focus
Abstract
A qualitative study of 61 youth receiving mandated services (child welfare, mental health, probation) or services where there were no alternatives (residential care for homeless youth) explored worker-client relationships from the perspective of young people themselves. Findings suggest three different but related roles played by workers that successfully engage adolescent clients: (1) ‘‘Informal supporters’’ de-professionalize their role and flatten hierarchies, emphasizing empathy and enforcing few rules; (2) ‘‘Administrators’’ enforce rules that are in the child’s best interest but do so with little emotional engagement; and (3) ‘‘Caregivers’’ who hold reasonable expectations and impose structures but are flexible in their negotiations with youth when rules were broken. While youth spoke most positively about their workers when they acted as informal supporters, a deeper analysis of the data showed that youth also engaged well with workers who enforced rules when those rules were necessary for the child’s safety, applied flexibly, age-appropriate, and fit with cultural norms. Use of all three approaches to youth engagement may help workers create better therapeutic relationships with youth receiving mandated services.
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