The job of a youth care worker in a group for adolescents with emotional and behavioural problems is intertwined with various life stories, experience and problems that require different areas of knowledge, approaches and reactions from workers and can bring out a range of emotions and experiences. One of behavioural problems of adolescents, who require special attention and a designed plan, is self-harm behaviour, closely connected with emotional and behavioural issues and is often present in group homes for adolescents with emotional and behavioural problems.
Self-harming is a behavioural pattern that is still considered taboo in our society. However, it offers many possibilities for researching and understanding the dynamics of this behaviour and for determining how to approach people with such problems. Paying more attention to researching this topic would indirectly result in support for youth care workers in their process. At the moment, studies concerning these issues are systematically quite unorganised and a lot depends on the workers themselves, their approach, knowledge of the problem and experiences.
In this master's thesis, we discuss the issues of self-harm behaviour from care workers perspective. We focus on workers’ understanding of self-harm behaviour as a behavioural pattern, their reaction in case of such occurrence with some of the adolescents from their group home, as well as their internal processes, experiences, and feelings when working with adolescents in a group with self-harm behaviour.
The theoretical part is the basis for the empirical part. We first described the characteristics of self-harming behaviour as a behavioural pattern; the background of its development, different approaches to research, and ways of solving problems that arise from self-harming behaviour. In the second chapter, we briefly describe adolescence. This is the period of life with the largest number of individuals with self-harming behaviour. In addition, adolescents are the focal group with which youth care workers deal in group homes. The last chapter of the empirical part is dedicated to describing life in a group home and the care workers' role in it.
The empirical part is based on a quantitative research carried out with a descriptive research method. By completing and analysing six half-structured interviews with youth care workers employed in group homes, we answered the following questions: to what extent are youth care workers familiar with self-harm as a behavioural pattern in adolescents in group homes, how much of the preventive work is dedicated to this topic, what are their reactions and methods of approach when they discover such problems in adolescents, and what they experience when they discover such behaviour and when they deal with it. Through research, we found that general knowledge of self-harm behaviour is very comprehensive and that youth care workers create their evaluation of this behavioural pattern mostly based on practical cases. They also base their preventive and curative work in this area on the state of the group. The more frequent the problem, the more attention it will receive. However, the feelings that workers experience when they discover and work with adolescents with such problems are very similar, even from a subjective point of view. All in all, the questions, dilemmas and feelings they experience are quite similar. At first, there's the fear, which does fade away after more experience of working with self-harm. There is also a lot of asking about it, about what brings an adolescent person to that behaviour and what can youth care workers do in the process for the reduction of those issues.
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