This thesis shows that foster youth can be active participants and agents in shaping their own lives, both in terms of developing and breaking relationships. The aim of the thesis is to examine the everyday lives of young people after entering various types of foster families, and to identify process in various contexts that influence their sense of belonging. Three of the studies are based on in-depth interviews with 17 foster youth, and a fourth study also includes follow-up interviews with 15 of them. The study’s perspective views the family as socially constructed as means of interactive rituals in which both adults and young people are social actors. The study demonstrates foster children’s motivation and aptitude for academic improvement, even despite previous severe problems in school. Study II illuminates the importance of both structure and warmth in foster youth’s everyday life. Routines normalize their daily life. Emotional warmth is created through doing things together. In particular, joking and laughing stand out as important inclusion practices. In study III the young people in kinship and network foster families are found to display the strongest social bonds to their foster families, and the young people in traditional foster families the weakest. Including network foster families in the study sheds light on the importance of adolescent’ active involvement in choosing their foster families.
96 s., utgitt av Örebro universitet i 2012.