Titel: "It's hard to ask for something, when you don’t now what to ask for”. A qualitative study of parents with disabled children and their meeting and contact with the municipal counseling.
This thesis deals with parents of disabled children and their meeting and contact with the municipal counseling and the issues that this contact may involve.
The method being used is exploratory, with openness to new understandings and unexpected angels of approach related to the parent’s stories and the outcome of the interviews. The text is based on five life world interviews.
In the study it appears, that even if all five parents experience struggles, there are two groups; those who get fairly well started in their contact with the municipal counseling, and those who get a bad starting-up. There is also a correlation between getting a good start versus a bad start in relation to the continuous contact they maintain characterized by the first meetings.
The study also finds that the parents use different strategies to get the support and the help they consider essential for their disabled children. As a rule, there are two main strategies, an offensive one and a defensive one.
The findings of the study are investigated by using some of the theories and concepts of Aron Antonovsky, Erwin Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu as tools for analysis.
Thus, it appears that the parents who get well from start also indicate having a greater sense of coherence and therefore better coping strategies. The better coping strategies are clearly the offensive strategy in which they are able to read their context and play their "roles" as well as being able to distance themselves to the expected roles in the meeting with the municipal counseling.
Conversely, the parents who get off to a worse start are indicative of having a smaller experience of coherence, which in turn affects their coping strategies becoming more defensively. They also find it difficult to understand the context they find themselves in and how to play the roles in their interaction with the municipal council. In this case there is a risk of stigma.
By focusing on strategies based on Pierre Bourdieus theories and concepts, the parents who are aware of the context they find themselves in - for example concerning social policy and economics - are also those who are best performing their strategies and vice versa. However, this does not appear to be random or "only" justified by a poor start in the contact, as those with the most offensive strategies also indicate to be those with the longest education, better finances and greatest social networking.
Therefor, it can be concluded that the parents who have offensive strategies in their contact with the municipal counseling are also the ones most often heard and the ones who receive the most help unlike those with the most defensive strategy.