ABSTRACT
Title: Living conditions for parents of children in out-of-home care: a qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Social Research literature often characterizes the biological parents of children in out-of-home- care as a segment of society living under poor conditions compared to the rest of the population. Since 2011, new legislation on foster care has been aimed at providing additional help to biological parents of children in care to enable -and even accelerate- a permanent reunion with their children. This thesis examines how biological parents of children in care experience their living condition and the help provided by the Danish State.
To elucidate the importance of living conditions to the well-being of parents whose children are in care, this thesis applies Erik Allardts’ theory of needs. The thesis uses qualitative research that provides subjective accounts of how these parents experience their living conditions. In addition, quantitative data on specific aspects of living conditions has been used to supplement the qualitative results and to create a more representative and nuanced picture of these parents’ living conditions. The Danish National Centre for Social Research has provided survey data for this investigation.
This thesis also gives an overview of the development of the parents’ living conditions from 1995 to 2009. Thus, qualitative analysis is integrated with statistical descriptive analysis. The quantitative results support the qualitative results on socioeconomic conditions. A majority of the parents have lower levels of education, lower employment rate, lower income and often diagnoses of psychiatric problems.
Surprisingly, the parents in this study do not express dissatisfaction with their relatively poor living conditions. They appear to value social relations with family and friends over recognition or status. One explanation may be that because they have difficulty obtaining socioeconomic improvements they focus on relationships through which they experience satisfaction.
This thesis also sheds light on the extremely complex collaboration between parents and the social services department, including the social worker. In as far, as there is a fundamental disagreement about the reasoning behind the placement of the child it will influence the future cooperation between the two parties and make it more difficult.