From ‘placement’ to ‘a child on the move’: Methodological strategies to give children a more central position in Child Welfare Service

Interviews including everyday experiences

Children and parents were interviewed face-to-face, CWS workers were interviewed by phone, and the current carer and the child's teacher were asked to fill out a short questionnaire. Everybody was interviewed as soon as possible after the placement. My article is mainly based on interviews with the 109 children, and I will therefore give priority to this part of the data construction.

In order to investigate the children's own experiences and reflections about the changes in their life situation, they were interviewed about their daily life as it was organized and lived just before placement, about the placement, and about life ‘today’, at the time of the interview. The first part of the interview was inspired by the life mode interview (Haavind, 1987), which takes the exploration of recent events as its point of departure. The interviewer invites the participant to take part in a conversation about the events of everyday life, using the description of what happened yesterday as a point of departure to explore the personal and social meanings of these events.

Earlier studies using the life mode interviews (Andenæs, 1996; Gulbrandsen, 1998; Haavind, 1987) have typically been conducted by experienced researchers who accomplish the interviews themselves, and with small samples of parents and/or children. In this study, with a much larger sample of children living all over Norway and interviewers without research experience, it was necessary to transform the interview mode from a more conversation-like interaction to an interview with mostly predetermined questions. To get a picture of how the child experienced his/her life before the change of residency, questions about daily routines were elaborated. How to ask and what to ask about was informed by the studies mentioned above. For instance, inquiries about reflections were tightly connected to specific questions about practice. Further, the knowledge acquired about the life of the ordinary children and their families served as a reminder to cover the whole day, including events like waking up, doing morning chores, eating breakfast, going to school, being at school, coming back from school, doing homework, spending time with peers, and going to bed.

The part of the interview exploring the concrete move started with a chain of specific questions closely structured to the temporality of how the move had been carried out. The children were asked when and how they had been informed about the placement and how the actual move had been carried out:

Did you know anything about the move in advance, or was it presented to you all of a sudden? Who was the first person to tell you? If they told you why you were going to move, what did they tell you? What did you think about the reason you were given for why you were going to move? How long was the period between you knowing about the move and the actual move? Who went with you when you moved?

We even asked about their opinions about what had happened, and whether anybody had asked for their viewpoints:

Did you think it was necessary to move? Do you think you should have moved earlier? Has anybody asked you about what you want to happen?

Most of the question entities were worked out as open-ended questions combined with predetermined reply options. This is an example of the structure of the questions:

Did you know anything about the move in advance, or was it presented to you all of a sudden?

Reply: ………………………………………………………………….

□ I thought that perhaps I was going to move □ I knew that I was going to move □ I knew nothing about it before it actually happened

The rule was to start with the open question and if no answer was elicited, then probe among the fixed answers. The interviewers were instructed to tick off the closest answer, in addition to writing down what the child may say. The aim of this particular structure was to make the interview a research tool that was less dependent on the interviewers’ skills, but still retaining some of the open and curious attitudes that are characteristic of qualitative interviews (Kvale, 2007).

The children and parents who participated in the study were struggling with a difficult time in their lives. Their vulnerability should not, however, be perceived as ‘a flashing red light ordering researchers to stop’ (Kipnis, 2001: 6), leaving the children mute (Curtis et al., 2004). Rather, the vulnerability should be viewed as a phenomenon calling for ethical, thoughtful research practices. Accordingly, priority was given to constructing an interview that would make sense for the participants and to organizing an interview session that would be positively experienced. We made a great effort to formulate questions that might seem relevant as well as supportive. Therefore, many of the questions posed to the children were about ordinary events, and the children were encouraged to talk about events that they appreciated, not only aspects of life that defined them as different from other children and that defined their family as inferior. Likewise, the set of questions posed to the parents (in most cases, single mothers) included aspects of their everyday lives that they probably shared with other parents, like lack of a babysitter when their children were young. Finally, the interview guide contained suggestions about how to attend to children who relate that their daily routines were lacking in caring and nurturing, like this: ‘When you tell me about your day, I understand that you manage to do a lot on your own. We know that many other children have to do the same.’ There is reason to believe that these ethically motivated measures even contributed to improve the quality of the interview data, by confirming, acknowledging, and normalizing the participants’ accounts (Kvale, 2007).

Social workers conducting research interviews

The interviews were conducted by child welfare workers from each of Norway's nineteen counties. This was very useful for the study, as they were all experienced professionals who were used to talking with children and parents and bound by their code of professional ethics. They were, however, not trained researchers, which was a fact that had to be addressed. First, we involved them in the logic of the research process through training seminars. In order to challenge ‘the folk version of reliability’, or the idea that you have to act in an identical way during each interview, we introduced the slogan ‘not as identical as possible each time, but as good as possible each time’. This was to make the importance of flexibility and adjustment explicit, as both aspects are central to research interviews about personal matters (Kvale, 2007).

Second, the interview guide was worked out in great detail in order to function as a kind of ‘remote control’ of the interviewer. The guide described precisely what kind of information we wanted, while encouraging the interviewer to be flexible in how he/she obtained that information. We anticipated that prompts and explanations would be required, and these were integrated into the interview. Thus, the interview guide offered suggestions about how to motivate the children, ideas on setting up and maintaining a ‘contract’ between the child and interviewer, and ideas about how to construct a shared focus in the interview situation, preferably on real and recently experienced events.

The interviews with the children lasted for about an hour. Afterwards, the interviewers expressed their surprise about how well the children handled the interview situation, and they referred to the interview process and the study as a whole as being useful for their own daily work. The connections they drew between practical work and research seemed to motivate them to make sure that the study ran smoothly and to collect the richest data they could (Andenæs et al., 2001).

Analysis: Reconstructing chains of events to contextualize data

Answers were written down immediately during the interview, and data was ready-made for the database accordingly. The data was analysed ‘across’ (between) children as well as ‘within’ each child. The across analyses dealt with the answers one by one from all of the children, and provided an overview of the main tendencies and variations. For example, according to the children (and the social workers), almost half of the placements had been carried out in a hurry. Because the temporal feature is not directly related to the use of a specific article in the Law on Child Protection, this is not registered in the national statistics, and was actually a surprising finding, raising questions about how this could possibly happen (Christiansen and Anderssen, 2010).

The analysis ‘within’ was inspired by the term ‘narrative configuration’ (Polkinghorne, 1995) referring to the process by which events are drawn together and integrated into a temporally organized whole. The purpose of narrative configuration is to provide a framework in which the range of disconnected data elements is made to cohere in an interesting way. In our case, this meant that the individual child's tick-offs to the predetermined reply options, as well as their relatively short answers to the open-ended questions, were chained in sequences. This strategy enabled us to construct descriptions of longer course of events. We constructed small stories from each of the children, like the following one provided by Bernt. Bernt is twelve years of age, and just recently moved away from his mother. He told the interviewer that he knew nothing about the move in advance:

(Did you know anything about the move in advance, or was it presented to you all of a sudden?) They came and said we should go and talk together. We should drive another car than mom’s, but then they drove to the children’s home. (Who told you this?) When we had been driving for a while, they stopped at a parking lot. (What did they tell you?) They said that we couldn’t stay with mom any longer because we did not get food and my mother was on drugs – even though she detests it – and that we had to stay at the children’s home. (What did you think about why you had to move?) I just didn’t understand it. (Has anybody asked about what you would like?) Nobody has asked me.

This strategy of reconstructing a chain of events reduces the impression of information as being mere bits and pieces, and keeps the data more contextualized and closer to the sense-making processes of the children. To strengthen and support this effect, the presentation of the results in this interview extract is graphically organized like in the example with Bernt; rather than a new line for each question and answer, the interview is presented as a continuous conversation. This underscores the collaborative quality of the narratives, which entails a co-construction between the child, the interviewer, and the researcher responsible for the analysis.

Preparing for the change of residency

In ordinary families in Norway today, preparing children for events to come is considered crucially important, as a way of treating them as central members of their families, and to prevent conflicts (Andenæs, 1996). With regard to the process of moving, this means leaving the child time for preparation, offering activities such as visiting the neighbourhood they are moving to, talking about what it will be like in the new house, and going to meet their class at their new school, etc. The children are thereby situated in the centre of what happens to them; they are treated as agents in their own lives, and their opinions and feelings are seen as important.

The 109 children were asked if they knew anything about the move in advance, or if it was presented to them suddenly. Thor is one of those who had been informed about the move more than four weeks ahead of time. He explains that it was a shared decision between him and mom, also stating, ‘I had some time to think about it’. It was talked about at school, and Thor talks about a farewell party in his class with buns, chocolate cake and wafers. However, the analysis across, examining all of the answers about preparations together, demonstrated clearly that this was far from the experience of everybody. More than half of the children who answered this question reported that they did not know about the move in advance. According to their answers, the placement was presented to them all of a sudden (see Table 1). Some of the children received the message while they were at school: I was told to wait at the office (at school) and had no idea about what was going to happen. Then the teacher arrived and said that I was going to a children's home.

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Table 1.

Did you know anything about the move in advance, or was it presented for you all of a sudden?

	Number of participants
I didn't know anything in advance	47
Thought perhaps it might happen	2
Yes, I did know about the move	42

To obtain a more detailed picture of the temporal aspects of preparations for moving, we asked the children how much time had passed between being told about moving and the actual move. Almost half of the children who answered this question said they were informed about the move on the same day or the day before (Table 2), like in this story:

(Did you know anything about the move in advance, or was it presented for you all of a sudden?) I knew nothing about it in advance. (Who was the first one to tell you about it?) There were two persons from the Child Welfare Service who travelled along with us by car and by boat. They said nothing about the move or why. We found out about it at the children’s home. The director of the children’s home was the one who told us. (Did they tell you why you were going to move?) Yes. They said it was because mom had been drinking alcohol. I don’t remember exactly what I thought, but I was sad.

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Table 2.

How long was the period between you knowing about the move and the actual move?

	Number of participants
One day or less	43
One week or less	17
More than one week	12
I don't know, don't remember	17

Note: Answers from 89 of 109 children.

According to the judgement of the social workers in the study, the placement had been carried out in a rush in two-thirds of the cases (Christiansen and Anderssen, 2010). This practice is in sharp contrast to child-centred, institutionalized practices elsewhere in our society. For example, procedures for entering day care are highly formalized with a fixed schedule facilitating a gradual transition from parental care to the care of the professionals at day care. Organizing placements precipitately is incompatible even with the ideals of child protection work. Still, it happens quite often according to this study. Whenever it happens, it can be understood as being the result of serious efforts to avoid a placement, as discussed in another paper from the study (Christiansen and Anderssen, 2010). Current politics on CWS in Norway, as well as in other countries (Maluccio, 1997), strongly emphasize family support and family preservation in assuming that interventions that strengthen the family unit result in benefits for children (Stortingsmelding nr. 40). This renders the children invisible as clients, by reducing them to appendages of their parents, and exemplifies what sociologists talk about as the familialization of childhood (Alanen, 1988); the child is primarily understood as being a family member, with the risk of being lost out of sight.

All of the families of the 109 children had a long history as clients in the CWS, with a mean duration of assistance of three years or more, implying that several of the families had been in contact with CWS during their children's entire lives. When all kinds of family support had been offered without the desired results, the social workers simply could not see any solution other than placement. This was a main finding in the analysis of interviews with the social workers of the 109 families (Christiansen and Anderssen, 2010). Their challenge was to find the right moment to intervene, in order to keep the conflict between parents and the system to a minimum. When a ‘triggering factor’ made an immediate placement urgent, they had to act quickly (Christiansen and Anderssen, 2010), with reduced preparation for the child as an unintended consequence. Because it was defined as ‘an exception’ every time it happened in a rush, the process seemed to be conducted without procedures being attentive to the child.

An additional postponement of the child being informed about the move was the ideal that parents, rather than professionals, should tell their children what was going to happen, and parents were expected and encouraged to do so. Yet, if this procedure is invariably followed, there is a risk that other adults may hesitate and even fail to intervene when parents do not manage the messenger task, thereby leaving the children as the last ones to know about what is going to happen to them. This happened to several of the children in this study, and can be seen as another result of the familialization of childhood.

Explanations and understandings of the change of residency

When ‘ordinary’ families move, the explanations are generally simple and easy for a child to understand, like better housing, better jobs for the parents, and being closer to relatives (Gulbrandsen, 1998). Above all, these types of reasons are easily validated within the wider social context. Far more troubled issues are at stake when the moves are initiated by the CWS, and children's confusion about the reason for placement into care has been reported (Whiting and Lee, 2003). To explore this theme, we started to ask the children whether they had been told why they were going to move. Among the 97 children who answered this question, 56 said ‘yes’, 28 ‘no’, and 13 ‘didn't know’ or ‘didn't remember’.

The children's meaning making processes of moving can be interpreted as negotiations between the children's own ideas, and explanations that were offered by parents or the CWS. Therefore, the children who confirmed that they had received an explanation were asked ‘what did they tell you?’ as well as ‘what did you think yourself?’ The answers to the first question contained elements of the following:

Parents' shortcomings, indicating that the lifestyle of their parents was violating canonical rules for decent behaviour or that they needed rest and/or professional assistance. Most frequently, explanations had to do with parents’ drug or alcohol abuse and the measures to be taken to solve parents’ problems. (‘My mother was going to a place where they could help her stop taking the pills’.)

When the children were asked about their own explanation for the move, quite a few said that they did not understand why they had to move, and/or referred to their emotional reaction, for example, ‘it made me very sad’. The answers from children who did present an explanation contained the same elements as the explanations offered by the social workers: parents’ shortcomings, interactional problems or the child's problematic behaviour.

However, this similarity does not imply that there was a complete agreement between the children's understanding and what they experienced as the explanation offered by the social worker. In many cases, there was a discrepancy between the two understandings, as reported by the children. To explore how the children seemed to handle and make use of the explanation provided by the adults, the child's description of ‘this is what I thought’ was related to what the same child said about ‘this is what they told me’. It was probably not easy for the children to make a distinction between their own initial understandings and the explanations they were offered. Still, the analysis indicated what kind of explanations they experienced as more or less helpful.

There seems to be two pitfalls for the helpers when manoeuvring into this landscape and trying to find helpful explanations. One pitfall is set up when the parents are too strongly blamed and disparaged, like in this example: (What did they tell you?) They said it was because she was not able to look after me – but she does! This way of doing it seems to mobilize the children to defend their parents, and to refuse to listen to further information. Another pitfall is set up when the adult's explanation is too rosy, compared to the child's own understanding, and problems in the home are minimized and rewritten, as seen in this interview:

(What did they tell you?) They told me it was because mother was so tired. (What did you think about this yourself?) I thought it was because she was drinking so heavily, but when they told me this other thing, that’s probably how it is.

Some of the social workers seemed to hesitate to tell children that they were going to be placed outside their family home and were reluctant to explain the actual background of the decision. Developmental psychology, in being so central to the way children are understood within the CWS (White, 1998), has been criticized for protecting children from everything that is not defined as ‘meeting the child's needs’ (Burman, 1994). A shared cultural wish to protect children from experiences that break the canonical rules of family life points in the same direction. The construction of children as vulnerable and in need of protection makes it difficult for those who are responsible for telling the children about the placement, and may contribute to explanations that do not match the social reality experienced by the child.

In both cases, the brutal as well as the rosy one, the explanations offered are almost impossible to share with others, they do not fit with the children's everyday life experiences, and may make the child even more confused about what is going on in their life. Explanations seemed to work better when they were based on knowledge of the child's everyday life. One of the social workers in the study who did know about the mess in the kitchen, the refrigerator without food, the beds without linen, and the lack of parental assistance in school work, emphasized this specific knowledge as a strength when trying to explain to Thomas, seven years old, why he had to move: We tried to relate it to concrete, everyday situations that Thomas had experienced and, in a way, that was possible for him to recognize rather than talking about a problem of alcohol abuse. This is an argument for increased attention towards children's everyday lives, even in the earlier phases of the CWS's work with children and their families.

Maintaining personal connections outside home

When children move to another residency, they do not leave just their family home; many of them even leave school and friends behind. One element of what is seen as culturally adequate parenthood is to facilitate such transitions, and to assist the child in maintaining contact with the persons and activities they are moving away from. A critical point that has been directed towards the CWS is that the planning of placements is restricted to the domestic sphere, forgetting the children's activities outside of the home and their social relations with extra-familial persons. This manifests itself when children tell how they struggle to adjust to measures taken by, for example, the CWS system to their own agenda (Sandbæk, 1999). Some of the children in our study said that the rush and lack of preparation interfered with their own arrangements and lives typically outside the family. ‘I had an appointment’, one of the children said, in explaining that he was shocked about the speed at which the move had been arranged. By adding ‘But who cares?’ he signalled a resignation to what had happened.

To explore this more systematically, the children who had moved to a new school (67 children) were asked about their contact with the children they had recently left. Out of the 54 children who answered the question, 17 said they had visited some friends while 18 children reported no contact with their former peers. They were also asked if anybody helped them keep in touch with friends from their former neighbourhood. About half of the 45 children who answered this question said they did receive the necessary help. The other half said no, and this was divided between those who wanted some contact and those who did not.

These numbers are not easy to interpret, as there was great variation in the life situations among the children. Some had belonged to the same class for several years when they left, yet others for just a couple of weeks. Some presented themselves as well integrated into their peer group, while others had no friends to talk about. Nevertheless, such questions and answers may serve as reminders to include extra-familial aspects of the process of moving in the professional understanding of a placement, to ensure a continuous involvement in children's everyday routine practices. The point is not about whether it is harmful or not for children if aspects like these are not taken into consideration. But keeping in contact with classmates and friends would be in accordance with current cultural standards for children's well-being, and it is worth discussing how cultural standards could possibly serve as guiding principles for the CWS, not only when it comes to placements, but on a broader scale and in an explicit, not merely implicit, way.