Session Information
05 SES 09 A, Marginalised Young People in Marginal Settings
Paper Session
Contribution
The rate of out-of-home placement in Israel for residential care settings (and not for foster families) is among the highest in the world (Kosher et al., 2018). Most of the children and youth who experience out-of-home placement, referred to as “at-risk youth,” are usually from low socioeconomic status (SES) families. These young people are referred to therapeutic or educational boarding schools. Therapeutic boarding schools (termed “residential care” in English-speaking countries) are offered to high-risk children (e.g., those suffering from neglect and abuse). The educational boarding schools (also known as “youth villages” in Israel) are offered to low SES youth who are characterized by living under “other risk,” that is, “problematic” living conditions (poverty, social marginalization, and geographical periphery) that may impair their life prospects. At-risk youth who are educated in therapeutic and educational boarding schools, therefore, experience a myriad of exclusions and structural vulnerabilities. Moreover, as a consequence of their out-of-home placement and removal from their biological families, these young people experience external intervention in their self-concept (Schutz & Luckmann, 1974). Removing a child from his or her home also means loss of attachment figures or “ambiguous loss” (Boss, 1999). Ambiguous loss describes situations and events in which the loss is unclear or unresolved. This loss, in turn, has been found in several studies to be related to stress and anxiety. This distress “can manifest in problematic behaviors, such as aggression, delinquency, and depression” (McWey et al., 2010, p. 1339). Studies also show that at-risk youth experiencing out-of-home placement are more likely to adopt risk behaviors as well as have psychological difficulties (Sulimani-Aidan, 2015). It is against this background that phenomenological examinations of the daily lives of at-risk youth are particularly important.
This article presents an interpretative examination of the future orientation of 28 boys and girls who attend educational boarding schools in Israel, and who had been removed from their families as a consequence of their families’ extreme poverty and not due to other possible risk factors (e.g., sexual abuse, drug-addicted parents, immigration). We propose to dissociate from the elasticity (Lubeck & Garrett, 1990) that characterizes the umbrella concept of risk, which comprises many risk factors without discerning among them. The empirical examination of future orientation of a specific population of at-risk youth––i.e., educational boarding school students––is important in light of the characteristics of this disadvantaged population living under multiple social exclusions.
Thus the primary research question of the current study is what characterizes future orientation among educational boarding school students in Israel who experience multiple social exclusions. An empirical response to this question may contribute to several fields of knowledge: the study of future orientation among youth living under social exclusion and experiencing structural vulnerability; the study of culture, inequality, and future orientation; the long-term effects of out-of-home placement; the study of the linkage between SES and self-concept, or what Reay (2005) called, “the psychic landscape of social class.”
Method
The current study included 28 youths who were enrolled at various educational boarding schools throughout Israel. Participants were of high school age (16-18) and had been removed from their home against the background of their family’s extreme poverty. All the youths' families are described by the educational and therapeutic staff at the boarding school as living below the poverty line in Israel. All the families also reside in localities that the Central Bureau of Statistics in Israel describes as localities of low socioeconomic class. Moreover, the interviewees reported a significant percentage (about 70%) of their parents do not work or receive income support contributions from the National Insurance Institute. About 40% of the youths had been removed from their homes by court order after their parents were charged with parental neglect of the child as a consequence of extreme poverty. The remaining participants were enrolled at the educational boarding schools by parental consent following recommendations from social workers. The participants were selected using purposeful sampling. The first inclusion criterion was high school-aged youths. The second criterion was gender. We chose to interview an equal gender representation. Data analysis revealed no gender distinctions. The third criterion was the “risk factor.” We chose to interview only those youths who were removed from their homes against the background of extreme poverty. The semi-structured interviews, which lasted from one to three hours in one sitting, included seven sections. In the first part, the interviewees were asked to describe their life stories freely. The second section included several questions intended to follow up on specific narrative descriptions related in the first part. The third section dealt with the interviewee's self-concept and included a single open question about how the interviewees would define their current self. The fourth section included questions about the decision to remove the interviewees from their home to an educational boarding school. The fifth section included questions about life in the boarding school. Part six included questions about the concept of future orientation. The final section included direct questions about the concept of risk, the removal of a child from home, the relationship with the parents, and the effects of being an at-risk youth. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Data analysis was done using the model developed by Lieblich et al. (1998) to identify the content and form of narrative interviews.
Expected Outcomes
The data analysis revealed four main themes: the desire to contribute to a better economic future for members of their nuclear and extended family; self-control over their future life; starting a family at an early age; and moral boundary work (contribution to the community and self-worth). The frequency with which these themes were presented reflects their prevalence among the students. Almost all the interviewees cited the first three themes. The fourth theme (moral boundary work), while heard less frequently and from fewer interviewees, was also reported by as many as half of the interviewees. Unlike reports addressing at-risk youth in other studies, the current interviewees did not convey difficulty in formulating aspirations or projecting themselves into the future (Raffaelli & Koller, 2005). However, their future orientation did not express optimism (Frye, 2012), aspirations for higher education, or high-status jobs (Crivello, 2015). The interviewees also did not view higher education as a panacea to resolve their poverty and social exclusion (Frye, 2012). They did not subscribe to the neoliberal ethos of hard work as a means to achieve upward mobility (Franceschelli & Keating, 2018). Similar to other studies concerning disadvantaged youth, young people in this study expressed aspirations related to marriage, family, and employment (Bryant & Ellard, 2015). The distinctive aspect of this study is highlighting the close linkage––explicitly suggested by the interviewees––between their current and imagined future life circumstances. This study’s interviewees linked their out-of-home placement experience with their aspirations and described a future that will “compensate” or serve as a “corrective experience” for a child who has been removed from his home and his biological-social environment. These future orientations, which are related to the interviewed youths’ current situation, may reflect the loss of attachment figures or ambiguous loss associated with removal from the home.
References
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bryant, J., & Ellard, J. (2015). Hope as a form of agency in the future thinking of disenfranchised young people. Journal of Youth Studies, 18, 485–499. Crivello, G. (2015). ‘There’s no future here’: The time and place of children’s migration aspirations in Peru. Geoforum, 62, 38–46. Franceschelli, M., Keating, A. (2018). Imagining the future in the neoliberal era: Young people’s optimism and their faith in hard work. Young, 26, 1–17. Frye, M. (2012). Bright futures in Malawi's new dawn: Educational aspirations as assertions of identity. American Journal of Sociology, 117, 1565–624. Kosher, H., Montserrat, C., Attar-Schwartz, S., Casas, F., & Zeira, A. (2018). Out-of-home care for children at-risk in Israel and in Spain: Current lesson and future challenges. Psychological Intervention, 27, 12-21. Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R., & Zilber, T. (1998). Narrative research: Reading, analysis, and interpretation. London: Sage. Lubeck, S., & Garrett, P. (1990). The social construction of the “at-risk” child. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11(3), 327–340. McWey, L. M., Acock, A., & Porter, B. E. (2010). The impact of continued contact with biological parents upon the mental health of children in foster care. Children and Youth Services Review, 32, 1338–1345. Raffaelli, M., & Koller, S. H. (2005). Future expectations of Brasilian street youth. Journal of Adolescence, 28(2), 249–262. Reay, D. (2005). Beyond consciousness? The psychic landscape of social class. Sociology, 39, 911-928. Schutz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1974). The structure of the life-world. London: Heinemann. Sulimani-Aidan, Y. (2015). Do they get what they expect? The connection between young adults’ future expectations before leaving care and outcomes after leaving care. Children and Youth Services Review, 55, 193–200.
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