Valérie Parent, PhD student, Université de Montréal, Canada 

Sarah-Louise Fraser, Researcher, Université de Montréal, Canada       

This presentation will share results from a qualitative research held in two residential care settings of Montreal, Canada among youths and interveners. In fact, Constitutional Law of Canada mandates the provinces to implement a system to protect youths when their development or security is compromised. In Quebec, to do so a continuum of services are in place to accompany and to protect youths. One of these settings is the residential care, which are living environments where interveners and youths share the everydaylife. It is documented that in this complex intervention context tensions and difficult situations are lived on a regular basis. Indeed, a specific litterature shows that because of their personal history youths in these settings are more prone to adopting oppositional and agressive behaviors, and interveners, faced with these types of behaviors, are more likely to using physical interventions  which contribute to the increase of difficult behaviors (Fraser, Archambault, & Parent, 2016; Fraser, Vachon, Hassan, & Parent, 2016). Motivated by a professional experience as a worker in residential settings, the main researcher was interested in exploring the youths’ and the workers’ experiences and sense-making through siuations of tension. Using a narrative approach, and a dyadic conceptual framework, the research explores the construction of youths’ and interveners’ narratives and analyse the tensions and the similarities between their narratives on shared situations. First of all, by studying the behaviors with an interactionist lense, the results allow for important reflections on how youths and interveners make sense of the difficult situations they live. Secondly, they  highlight proximal and distal elements involve in the construction of tension. Finally, the results give insights on ways to improve the work in this setting by giving a different understanding of oppositional and aggressive behaviors.

Key-words: Residential care setting, oppositional and aggressive behaviors, sense-making, narrative approach, communicational theories