Conferences

This paper presents and discusses the ethical and methodological issues involved when conducting a prospective survey among a vulnerable population: young people (including minors) in state-run child care and on a sensitive topic: transition from care to adulthood.

Since previous studies have shown that youth leaving care are at high risk of social exclusion, this project responds to a strong social demand to shed light on the critical period following leaving care, when young people have to fend for themselves. The objective is also to overcome the limits and biases which affect the available data on this subject. Most leaving care studies are based on retrospective data collected among people who have left care for several years. Besides some memory and reconstruction biases, this kind of approach tends to leave out the most and the less integrated people. Thus, the ambition of this new project experimented in France is to follow up 1000 youth from age 17 to 23 through 3 data collection rounds, with several contacts in between.

Of course, such a prospective survey raises many critical methodological and ethical questions. In order to test its feasibility and design the conditions under which it should be undertaken (or not), qualitative interviews have been conducted with youth in care and a follow up of 100 young people over a six month period with two data collection rounds (before and after their leaving care) has been planned. If the sample can be drawn from the Child Welfare database, to be fully representative of the population, the first inclusion wave has to be conducted just before the leaving care, when most of the youth are still minors and live in foster families or residential settings. Since the great majority of these youth are under their parents’ legal authority, a parental agreement is required (before proposing any interview to any child). This is a first key issue: depending on the parental agreement rate, selective sampling biases can be expected. From an ethical perspective, how does one deal with the parents’ legal rights and that of young people who have often broken off with their families? This protocol also implies cooperation from the care structures (where youth live) to get in touch with the youth drawn while keeping a correct distance with social workers (who should not interfere) and ensuring the confidentiality of responses.

Then, from a follow up perspective, the main difficulty remains the attrition. How to stay in touch with a population both very mobile and vulnerable? More specifically, how to avoid the selective attrition expectable among young people who want to cut themselves off from their institutional past, and among youth in very precarious situations? How to reconcile the necessity of frequent contacts with people with no interference nor intervention in their lives, especially if very difficult moments occur?

Finally, the implications of the sensitivity of the topic and population on the questionnaire will also be presented.