Institute for Studies in Children and Youth Services
What do the lives of children, young people, and families look like today? Where does social work with children, young people and families stand today? How can these services support children on their path to adulthood?
A large number of children and youth services and facilities are available in Switzerland. On the one hand they support, protect and accompany children and young people. On the other, services provide parenting support. Taken together, children and youth services is a field of action under-going dynamic development and grounded on the interaction of local authorities, cantons, and private agencies. Child and youth services offers are aimed at promoting children, young people, and families, at enabling them to cope with particular challenges and burdens, and at providing parenting support under difficult family circumstances. This field of action is central to our research and development activities. Our key working areas are:
Our work in this area explores and researches the following topics and fields of action:
- Open child and youth work, child and youth development
- School-to-apprenticeship transitions and independent living
- School social work
- Child protection, assessment of threats to the child’s welfare
- Parenting support: residential education, foster families, ambulatory family support
- Use of media and media competence of children, young people and parents
- Social participation of children and youths
Our key task in this area is to describe and to analyse the structures and conditions of children and youth services and to support developmental process. We offer:
- Situational analyses: Describing the children and youth services available in cantons, regions, and local communities
- Supporting processes for developing children and youth services and their structures
- Supporting the establishment and maintaining of statistics and monitoring in children and youth services
- Supporting processes for developing communal youth and family guidelines
- Cooperation with local authorities, services, and service providers
- Indication concepts
- Quality development
Lacking knowledge of the life-situations and ways of life of children, youths, and families means lacking crucial indicators for enabling the offerings and forms of actions of children and youth services to meet actual needs. Our current work therefore focuses on the following areas:
- Living situation and offers tailored to needs
- Mediatisation of childhood and youth
Institute staff undertake research and development, provide services, run further education programmes, and teach on the FHNW’s Bachelor and Master of Arts in Social Work.
The FHNW School of Social Work attaches great importance to research and development. The Institute for Studies in Children and Youth Services undertakes commissioned and self-initiated research and development projects in the following areas:
- Child protection
- School social work
- Residential education, ambulatory family services
- Open child and youth work, child and youth development
- Supporting school-to-apprenticeship transitions and independent living
- Care leavers and their needs
- Analysing the appropriateness of services
- Services for families affected by parental mental illness
- Media education
- Media use and media skills in children, youths, and parents
- Participation
We provide the following services:
- Evaluations
- Situational analyses and needs analyses
- Developing communal youth and family guidelines
- Supporting programme development and innovations
- Analysing the structures and steering mechanisms of children and youth services
- Inhouse training
Contact us! — Our priority is to tailor projects to your specific needs. We take the greatest care to establish your needs, in order to help you achieve your objectives.
Prof. Dr. Rahel Heeg, Joint head of Institute
rahel.heeg@fhnw.ch
T +41 61 228 59 57
