Research project The public responsibility for children in foster care
"The public responsibility for children in foster care: preconditions, strategies and meanings of social services monitoring" is the name of a research project led by David Pålsson.
The most far-reaching intervention in the Swedish child protection system is out-of-home care (residential and foster care). Foster care is the most common and means that a child is removed from his/her guardians and placed in another family. A placement implies a considerable societal responsibility. Historically there is evidence of serious maltreatment in care and current research show that the care has deficiencies within important care aspects.
Project description
The public monitoring of care is crucial and, during the last decade, a stronger audit apparatus has been established to secure the quality of out-of-home care. An overall conclusion of prior research on residential care shows that the audit has difficulties to affect central care aspects, which fundamentally means that we do not know whether the inspections promote care. As to foster care, the municipalities have the primary audit responsibility.
Foster care is in many respects a complicated audit object. A placement involves an organizational separation between the social services and the foster homes. This is increased by the fact that the social services more frequently buy care from private companies who recruit and support foster carers. Further, foster care is executed by laypersons in a family context. How the social services might gain insight into care and actually affect childrens situations is not self-evident.
The research project aims at increasing knowledge about preconditions, strategies and meanings of monitoring foster care. The research is performed through case studies of four municipalities with varying organization of the monitoring. The case studies encompass analysis of municipal documents as well as interviews with both auditors (representatives of social services) and auditees (foster parents, children). The research project provides necessary complementary knowledge to the dissertation regarding the public responsibility to control out-of-home care for children.
Project members
Project managers
David Pålsson
Senior lecturer, associate professor
