Malin Åkerström

Vårdkedja för ungdomar eller professionella? En processutvärdering av projektet ”Motverka våld och gäng”

A “Treatment Chain” for Young People or the Professionals? A Process Evaluation of the "Counteract Violence and Gangs"- Project in Sweden

Summary, in English

This report concerns a large evaluation of a project concerning Swedish juvenile care. We analyse how professionals, youngsters and parents perceived and interpreted the three-year project which involved different authorities whose representatives should form a care-giving chain. The project also employed a number of coordinators. Beyond accounting for the results from just over one houndred interviews and an intense field work our ambition was also to place our findings in a greater social and cultural context.



The origin of our analysis is based upon the empirical material, not from a before hand constructed perspective; the example of the coordinators’ focus on administrative issues was therefore discovered through interviews and observations and not something that we were looking for or even expecting to find. At the same time no analysis can arise solely from an empirical material. When we, for example, use terms like ‘dispute props’, when talking about the involved actors discussions on different documents, it origins from reading the work of the classic sociologist Georg Simmel and modern social psychologist Ervin Goffman, both using dramaturgy as a metaphor for social interaction.







The lasting impression from this project is the administrative position of the involved officials. They were strongly committed to meetings and documents, they reviewed and assessed each other using a bureaucratic language rather than discussing the individual youth with commitment. In fact the youths rather fell into a discursive shaddow when reading the interviews and field observations.



In projects like this one, where officials should cooperate, the danger is that the meeting with its attached bureaucracy becomes the goal instead of the means.



A more pragmatic stance regarding the meeting would rather see them being means through which distinct decisions and results carried the youth forth in a direction which the group, the parents and the youth had agreed on (the latter categories should, according to directives, be integrated). The meetings we attended rather displayed a startling inertia, issues that could have been resolved between meetings were not. The shortcomings in the measures were not followed up with attribution of responsibility.