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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry
Sec. Developmental Psychopathology and Mental Health
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frcha.2024.1360365
This article is part of the Research Topic Women In Developmental Psychopathology and Mental Health View all articles

Women In Developmental Psychopathology and Mental Health Residential childcare worker perceptions of work-related achievement and pride

Provisionally accepted
Denise M. Brend Denise M. Brend 1,2,3,4*Oyeniyi S. Olaniyan Oyeniyi S. Olaniyan 5Delphine Collin-Vézina Delphine Collin-Vézina 4,6,7,8
  • 1 Laval University, Quebec, Canada
  • 2 International Centre for Comparative Criminology, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • 3 Centre de Recherches appliquées et interdisciplinaires sur les violences intimes, familiales et structurelles (RAIV), Québec, Canada
  • 4 Canadian consortium on child and youth trauma, Montréal, Canada
  • 5 Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum, Oppland, Norway
  • 6 McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • 7 Centre for Research on Children and Families, Faculty of Arts, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • 8 Nicolas Steinmetz & Gilles Julien Chair in Social Pediatrics in Community, Montréal, Canada

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Multiple risk and protective factors influence the wellbeing and retention of child protective and youth justice professionals. Less attention has been given to empirically understand how residential childcare workers (RCW) experience these factors. A sense of pride and of achievement may be related to competence and satisfaction, which have been identified as protective factors against staff turnover. Responses to the Secure Base Interview Protocol question "What aspects of caring for (name of child in their care) have given you the greatest sense of pride or achievement?" were extracted from 81 individual interview transcripts from Canadian RCW and analyzed using the Interpretive Description methodology. Themes were aggregated using the thematic analysis technique to create descriptions of RCW pride and achievement. The RCW identified many experiences of work-related pride and achievement while caring for children and youth. These positive experiences were described to occur contingent on the level of mutuality and trust in the helping relationship shared between the RCW and child or youth in their care. The reciprocal nature of the relationships described by RCW that gave rise to their felt sense of pride and accomplishment is a novel finding. Future work is indicated to better understand how protective factors related to RCW wellbeing may indeed be relationally constructed and dependent.

    Keywords: Childcare worker, wellbeing, pride, accomplishment, child protection, Youth justice, residential care, Protective factor

    Received: 22 Dec 2023; Accepted: 05 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Brend, Olaniyan and Collin-Vézina. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Denise M. Brend, Laval University, Quebec, Canada

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