Paper
The risk of continuity of institutional culture: the case of the residen-tial care for children
- issue: Issue 2 / 2009
- authors: Federico Zullo, Paola Bastianoni
- keywords: Italy
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abstract
Background. Care services and the question of efficacy and attention to intervention centred on individual. It's very important, about the residential care for children, to focus the attention on the quality of offered services, in particular because- in spite of institutional or business culture/perspective- in this type of context there are customers who have social and relational needs; for this reason it's fundamental the role of collaborative intervention.
The educator (as person who offers a specific service) has to act a form of intervention which try to resolve the problematic situations of abuse, ill-treatment and carelessness that children (as the customers of services) lived in their families and in their life out of residential care; this intervention is characterised by a system of educative actions centred on the determination of a better trend of children personality development. So, the educators' educative responsibility, the substitution of business/economical/ bureaucratic/institutional logic and, at least, the collaborative actions are the basis of each form of intervention in residential care for children.
This reflection underlines that the residential care can represent a model of social intervention in which it's possible to find the symbolic presence of an institutional culture with all its problematical nature; this situation invites to overcome the problems of this type of culture to permit to adopt in residential care an alternative form of intervention centred on the conjugation of the requests of the efficacy and the personalisation of intervention, of the effective children needs and efficacious outcomes of educative actions.
Purpose. At the beginning, the authors founded the prevalent cultural model of residential care with its institutional characterisations by means of the realisation and application of a thematic schedule of institutional indicators defined in literature.
The object of this part of work was to analyse the narrative/discoursive educators' production as meaning of their specific social representations, recognizing in this way the educators' cultural models, that are the mental rooms, the meaning universes that educators use in their narrative production (and of course also in their actions) to organize their behaviours, their actions, their educative interventions. This cultural models are the result of collusive processes acted in the specific context of residential care.
The methods for this research (to recognised the "density" of institutional culture) are qualitative one: observations in presence with the transcription of the observed material during the group meetings and the supervisions (for the duration of six months); interviews to supervisor, coordinator and three educators; analysis of residential care documentation (daily diary, documentation drawn up for the Children Tribunal, reports of meetings between social services and residential care group).
Findings. The recognised cultural model of residential care permits to discuss with the educative group the persistence of a cultural orientation characterised by institutional elements: presence of punitive actions and a specific idea of residential care, child, educator and education linked to a behaviouristic approach and to an institutional one.
At the same, it's discovered the educators' moderate ability to analyse their own actions and representations and their desire to substitute the precedent institutional orientation with a methodological change centred on the proposal to act a relational perspective in their educative interventions, focusing the attention on children and their needs, for a social construction of a new idea of residential care. So we want to recommend to educators the importance of a work on their emotions and their cultural model of educative intervention to recognised and overcome institutional elements and behaviours. This possibility can be real if the policy and local government can help the Research with monetary contribution for training courses to create a shared organization culture of not-institutional model of residential care intervention. Only in this way it's possible to organize adequate educative interventions for the real problems of children and families.
The progressive change from an institutional perspective of the organisation of the residential setting to a relational perspective is a cultural result that we can observe trough the progressive change in social workers' language (increasing of relational and affective topics and a progressive reduction of the prevalence of organizational topics), in social workers'acts (increasing of relational acts: supportive acts, care-acts, instrumental acts, pleasure acts and reduction of the prevalence of burocratic acts) and in the social workers'mood (increasing in the satisfaction in the relation with the children and reduction of anxiety and insatisfaction).
Key references
Bastianoni, P. (2000). Interazioni in comunità. Roma: Carocci.
Bastianoni, P., Rubino F., Taurino A., Palareti L., & Berti C. (2006). Rappresentazioni della qualità nei servizi di comunità per minori: un'esperienza di focus group. Psicologia scolastica, 4(2).
Emiliani, F., & Bastianoni, P. (1993). Una normale solitudine. Roma: Nuova Italia Scientifica.
Contacts: Federico Zullo, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, via Hanau 16 44100 Ferrara, E-mail: fedez21@libero.it.