Annual of social work, Vol. 11 No. 2, 2004.
Original scientific paper
THE IMPORTANCE OF CHILD'S PERCEPTION AND DESCRIPTION OF PARENTS IN SOCIAL-PEDAGOGICAL DIAGNOSTICS
Antonija Žižak
Maja Vučinić Knežević
Abstract
Information about parents of children with behaviour disorders, i.e. about parents whose children have been put in the care of the social welfare system and placed in children's homes, usually comes from experts and is tinted with their perspective, theories and knowledge. As opposed to that, in the scientific research project «Social-pedagogical diagnosis – participation of users in the process of assessment of needs and planning interventions» the focus of attention is the perspective of the users, children and young people. The user perspective was achieved through specially prepared experts who repeatedly talked to 40 children/young people aged 12 to 20, placed in a residential community (13), or diagnostics department of the children's home (27), and later copied, analysed and checked with the users the taped interviews in accordance with the demands of qualitative methodology. The interview was carried out at that time of their lives when the decision was being made where they would live in the future, i.e. what form of treatment they would receive. In a half-structured interview the children/young people talked about different fields and topics from their lives including perceptions and attitudes about their own parents. The purpose of this paper is to recognise patterns in describing and perceiving the mother, father, foster-father and family in general as well as considering the meaning of the range of perceptions and descriptions of parents for the quality of social-pedagogical diagnostics. It has been proved that parents are for young people a very important topic richly elaborated in their self-presentation. The description of the father is much richer than that of the mother. Viewed on a group level the perception of the parents contains features of completeness and internal consistency. These and other data elaborated in the paper can greatly enhance the diagnostic process because they give the perspective of the user the most significant position.
Keywords
self-presentation; user perspective; perception of parents and family; social-pedagogical diagnosis
Hrčak ID:
3386
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2004.
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