Quote of the Day

By the time people encounter the care system, they have already constructed a way of understanding this experience and its meaning in their lives. As Durrant (1993) has indicated, we go through a process of giving to an experience a definition that creates for each of us our individual way of knowing it. Making or giving meaning to an experience helps each of us to establish order in our experiencing (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), for meaning is the idiosyncratic significance that each of us gives to the connections between the experiences of our lives (Pharis, 1993). People seeking help, therefore, encounter the care system from within the interpretative frame they are using to organize and give meaning to the experience.

In child and youth care practice we must concern ourselves not only with how people in general might experience the processes we have created but also with how each individual might make meaning of them. We must also be concerned with the meaning we have given to the processes in which we are involved so that we can understand how our interpretation of events and actions within these processes are framed by the overall meaning we have assigned to the event. We need to attend to how we have limited our thinking because of how we have framed our perceptions (Castaneda, 1994; Goffman, 1974).

When child and youth care workers first encounter a youth, therefore, it may be important for them to take time to explore the meaning the youth is giving to the need for care so as to understand how those youth are interpreting the experience. Through understanding how people have constructed their experience of needing care, we are more able to connect with them and to help them find different ways to frame their experience (Durrant, 1993).

In the practice of child and youth care it is now common to include clients in the decision-making processes that affect their lives. They might be included, for example, in intake meetings, intervention planning meetings, support groups, unit planning, and evaluation (Garfat, 1990). When we seek to include clients like this, we do so because of a field-held belief that such inclusion increases involvement, decreases isolation, creates a sense of personal empowerment, and has positive carry-over effects into the post-care environment (Brendtro & Ness, 1983; Garfat, 1990; Whittaker, 1979). The result of this philosophy of inclusion may be less than hoped for, however, if clients do not give to this inclusion the same meaning as the staff and organizations that advocate for it. Like all experiences, the experience of inclusion may be construed differently by the different participants.

Polanyi (1962) identifies two kinds of meaning — those in which one thing, like a word, means another (representative), and those, like a tune, in which the thing means something only in itself (existential). When an experience is too large, overwhelming, or interconnected for us to break it into its component parts we give meaning to the whole of the experience. When youth first enter care they must make meaning of the experiences they encounter. When this experience is totally new they will begin by giving a meaning to the whole, or gestalt, of the experience because they will be unable, before knowing it, to break it into its constituent parts. How youth give such meaning may be determined by previous cultural experiences and the symbolic meanings attached to such an action within the interpretative frame they normally use. Once a youth has evoked this interpretive frame to give meaning to the initial experience, this may give shape to everything that follows and we enter the territory of "self-fulfilling prophesies" (Baizerman, 1994). If we can understand how a youth is making sense of an experience, then we can be of assistance in finding ways to "make sense of things differently" (Durrant, 1993, p. 11). If we do not pay attention to what the experience of placement means to a youth, we have no way of understanding the behaviour we see except within our own interpretive system.

THOM GARFAT
Garfat, T. (1998) The effective Child and Youth Care intervention: A phenomenological inquiry. Journal of Child and Youth Care. Vol.12 No.1-2 pp 25-26