Fight, freeze or flee: Exploring youngsters’ strategies in dealing with youth care interventions

Abstract

Continuity of care is seen as a challenge for youth care services. Research on continuity of care in relation to youth care services is scarce, and there is a strong tendency to overly stress the managerial and technical aspects of care. However, research on continuity from a youngster’s perspective suggests a more complex construction of continuity. The connection with youth care services is especially under pressure in the confrontation with difficulties and critical moments. In this narrative study, we aim at gaining insight into youngsters’ different strategies in vulnerable situations when facing difficulties in their trajectories in relation to youth care interventions. By retrospective reconstruction of their trajectories in relation to youth care interventions, youngsters were able to express significant moments in their biographical timeline. The narratives are analysed using the framework given in literature on users’ coping strategies in relation to dissatisfaction in services: loyalty, voice, exit and neglect. We have chosen three topical life stories of youngsters to represent the research findings that illustrate identified strategies of fighting, freezing and fleeing care, which are to be viewed as translations of the Hirschman coping strategies. However, a deeper analysis of these interactions results in a more complex view on strategies and shows that these can be misinterpreted by youth care workers. Different elements such as timing, clinical overshadowing or the pre-structured nature of youth care interventions are linked to this mismatch between what youngsters want and what youth care workers offer. Options are presented to handle these difficult interconnections.