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Paper

Organizational ethnography of a residential service for out-of-home children

abstract

Background. The research context is an Italian residential home for juveniles located in the Lazio Region, with non-resident staff organized in 24-hours shifts. The community belongs to a social cooperative, which also runs other social services. At the beginning of the research, the number of resident children amounted to ten, with heterogeneous ages and problems. The community, in fact, is not specialized in hosting a specific group of children.

Residential homes, after the closure of orphanages on December 31, 2006, pursuant to Article 2 of Law n. 149/2001, are indeed the principal agencies handling the out-of-home children phenomenon.

This paper reports an action-research which brought valuable indications for the community's operational management. This type of service, in fact, as reported in national (Bastianoni, 2000; De Leo et al., 2000) and international literature, needs to take a global re-thinking process of the organizational and the housing functioning, as well as of the educational model.

 

Purpose. We started the research by asking basic questions on multiple dimensions, including socio-political and more proper psychological ones, most notably as regards the staff. Indexes concerning children's well-being were not considered in the research, as they will constitute the subject matter of future projects in this field. The following were among the questions asked: Do these services work? How children are housed? Which management methods are used? What are the outcomes? What are the evaluation models?

 

Which methods have been used? The ethnographical method, strictly qualitative, aims at describing the context observed. After a long period of participant-observation, ethnography aims at proposing an account of the system observed, deemed plausible by the social actors of the context itself. The observed group was comprised of workers' team (six female educators), ten kids, three volunteers and four managers. The data, gathered by means of field notes, audio and video recordings, include: an audio-recorded interview with the two founders; staff meeting observations; spot interviews with staff; environmental documents (e.g., daily schedules, children's files, internal documents, meeting staff files); and participant observations' field notes and video-recordings of interactions in community (90-minute recordings).

 

Findings and implications. Outcomes focused on qualitative dimensions of the organization, also supported by quantitative data concerning kids and educators' high turnover rates. Based on this outcome, we initiated a meeting process with the entire staff, to whom we presented our work. Principal results were derived along two different dimensions: the working activity of educators' staff and the global organizational feature.

As regards the first point, the following were found:

-        workers' perceived distance from being a part of the organizational system;

-        responsibility issues: ambiguous distribution of activities, frequent re-negotiation and redundancy of distribution of work;

-        lack of awareness of being part of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998);

-        work focused on kids' emergencies;

-        redundant use of work artefacts (schedules, daily books, medical diaries);

-        difficulties in work socialization;

-        lack of private spaces for workers in the community.

 

As regards the organizational plan, the following were found:

-        paternalistic management;

-        responsibility diffusion within managers;

-        lack of investment in organizational development (notably, lack of consideration as to the use of artefacts from workers);

-        "empty" function of the supervision process, used as the only organizational meeting, not in his primary clinical feature (De Leo et al., 2000);

-        high staff turnover rates.

 

The principal implications for social services' policymakers and professionals deal with the investment in the organizational level of residential home for juveniles which, centred on emergencies management, risk to loose control over the working activity itself and the educational processes. A possible implication would be to train not only workers, but also managers, and to invest in the use of work artefacts and in understanding the causes of high staff turnover rates. Indications for research are to deepen knowledge of organizational functioning of communities, trying to propose new models and innovations.

 

Key references

Bastianoni, P. (2000). Interazioni in comunità. Roma: Carocci.

De Leo, G., Bussotti, B., & Josi, E. (Eds.). (2000). Rischi e sfide nel lavoro di comunità di tipo familiare: esperienze di progettazione, metodologie dell'intervento e supervisione. Milano: Giuffré.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA.

 

Contacts: Marzia Saglietti, Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Psicologia dei Processi di Sviluppo e Socializzazione, Facoltà di Psicologia, stanza 3, 4° piano, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Roma, E-mail: marzia.saglietti@uniroma1.it, Phone (+39) 06 49917673.

 

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