Parental Participation in Juvenile Justice Institutions: Parents’ Perspectives on Facilitating and Hindering Factors

abstract

Background: Participation of parents during their adolescent’s detention is important for achieving positive treatment outcomes for youths and their families. To improve parental participation, insight in facilitating or hindering factors is necessary. To this end, we studied the perspectives of parents of adolescents detained in two juvenile justice institutions in the Netherlands.

Methods: Data were collected from 19 purposefully selected parents through semi-structured interviewing. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and imported into ATLAS.ti where data were coded and analyzed.

Results: Parental participation is influenced by a variety of factors that could be categorized based on the following themes: (1) practical facilitating or obstructing factors; (2) parent-related emotional and mental factors; and (3) factors concerning issues of the parent-adolescent relationship.

Discussion: Insight into the factors which facilitate and obstruct participation might help JJI staff understand differences in parental participation. This may enable them to tailor solutions which would improve parental participation during their adolescent’s detention.

Keywords:

• Family-centered care
• youth detention center
• parental participation
• delinquent adolescents

Notes

1 When describing the outcomes we use quantifiers to refer to the number of respondents involved. As a rule of thumb, these quantifiers could be interpreted as follows: “A few” = 2; “Some” = 3-4; “Almost/About half” = 5 or 6; “Half” = 7; “More than half” = 8; “Most” = 9 – 13; “All” = 14.