The aim of this dissertation is to examine the components of residential child care (RCC) practice as a context, and its orientations, methods and knowledge base to conceptualize the actions and intentions in RCC, with the ultimate final aim of pro-posing an RCC competence profile grounded in social pedagogy theory to explore RCC as a profession.
Despite it being a significant field of practice with a longstanding history, residen-tial child care (RCC) research to date has been limited in its scope and impact. There is hardly any empirical evidence showing how residential care programs actually work (Harder & Knorth, 2015) and, on the other hand, recent RCC research has been influ-enced by social work, psychology and medicine (Nunno et al. 2014). More research on residential program models and their active ingredients, standards, practices and methods is encouraged (Knorth et al., 2002; Storø, 2013; James, 2015a; Nunno et al., 2014; Cameron, 2016). To contribute to the RCC research field, this dissertation of-fers an overview of the components (ingredients) of RCC practice as well as of the knowledge base behind the actions and intentions. The dissertation is practice-fo-cused research, enabling knowledge creation from professional RCC practice. Theory building is regarded here as an activity essential to both RCC respondents’ continued professional development and the improvement of service. The quality of RCC service will improve as members of a profession increase their level of understanding and skills; furthermore, understanding, in turn, will increase not only as the members ac-cumulate experience, but also as they draw upon and contribute to the development of an expanding body of theory (see Weiss-Gal & Welbourne, 2008).
The fundamental aim of the study is to provide an understanding of the possible competencies in RCC; to reflect how social pedagogy’s theoretical foundation is pres-ent in RCC practice. The study intends to construct a social pedagogy-informed model
of RCC work that reflects the scholarly debate on possible social pedagogy-related professional competencies. Attempts to put social pedagogy principles into practice are especially important, since there are some critics who opine that although ‘social pedagogy is said to be a practically oriented expertise, the practice is not sufficiently present in its theoretical foundation’ (Storø, 2013, 23); theory and practice are not in dialog. The practical interest was to make an attempt to combine the results of the sub-studies and concept analyses into a social pedagogy-informed profile of RCC competencies; or to professionalize the RCC practice. The theoretical interest of knowl-edge production is to develop social pedagogy theory towards an integrated approach for the RCC workforce with different professional groups and training backgrounds.
In this summary, in addition to summarizing the findings of the sub-studies and up-dating the analysis, I expand on the published information by adding the theoretical fundamentals to reflect in more detail on how to achieve a balance between ordinary home-like parenting (care) and special institutional upbringing orientations while de-livering RCC care.
The recognition of RCC practice is seen as informed actions in a special context that are guided by values and grounded in theory. Social pedagogy is offered as a distinctive knowledge base as well as values and professional ethics that guide RCC practitioners in how to implement methods and interventions appropriately, how to develop knowledge-based work orientations, as well as how to create an educative upbringing in an RCC context. Ekeland and colleagues (Ekeland et al. 2019) empha-sise that social work (including residential practice) should be informed by research and evidence, and not only be based on values and ethics. The research design with interconnected components of professional RCC practice is described in Figure 1.
PROFESSIONAL RCC PRACTICE
Methods RCC Context
Orientations
Values
Professional Ethics Social Pedagogy
Figure 1. Research design with interconnected components of professional RCC practice.
The empirical part of the dissertation consists of three empirical sub-studies, which have been reported in articles (Timonen-Kallio, 2012; Timonen-Kallio, Laukkanen
& Hämäläinen, 2016; Timonen-Kallio, 2019) and a social pedagogy analysis of RCC work (Timonen-Kallio & Hämäläinen, 2019). The sub-studies’ contributions to the core research aim are presented in Table 1 below.
Table 1. The contribution of to the sub-studies for the core research aim to examine the RCC RCC in a complexity of welfare services and the light of the recent social pedagogy related
All three empirical sub-studies were needed in order to investigate the complex RCC practice with the fragmentation of the work framework and the suspense of the ex-pertise level of employee . Sub-study I explored the ‘methodology orientation’ among RCC workers, and their use of practical methods and tools. Sub-studies II and III were needed to investigate RCC workers’ knowledge base, professional status and autonomy. In turn, sub-study III explored the contexts of interprofessional work and skills and the attitude of RCC workers towards delivering an integrated RCC service.
These findings (sub-studies I, II and III) constituted a source for an overall social ped-agogy analysis of the knowledge and competencies that are considered relevant for RCC and to subsequently model competencies that accomplish RCC expertise (sub-study IV). This (sub-study presents the social pedagogy research area, where the interest
is in empirical studies on practical work and developmental work research (Nivala &
Ryynänen, 2019, 323). In this study the interest is to investigate the interprofessional RCC process and work methods in order to develop the educative practices in child protection institutions.
This summary proceeds in the following way: in Chapter 2, I present the concep-tual structure to investigate the components of professional RCC practice. In Chapter 3 the focus is on the theoretical foundations of the study to reflect the professional knowledge base and expertise in RCC in light of the recent social pedagogy-related debate. In Chapter 4, I present the methods of gathering and analyzing the data, as well as reflect on the ethical questions related to the study. The findings, interpreta-tions and implicainterpreta-tions of the sub-studies can be found in Chapter 5, and Chapter 6 returns to the RCC expertise and provides a competence profile of the potential skills requirements for RCC practitioners derived from the present sub-studies. In Chapter 7, I discuss the empirical findings of the dissertation as a whole and draw conclusions for providing a high-quality RCC intervention as an eventual separate profession of its own, and finally in Chapter 8, the study and its implications for RRC research, practice and education are evaluated.