Need for Common Definitions

Jana Hainsworth, the Secretary General of Eurochild (to which I have been recently accepted as a member too), gave a presentation on the way EU involvement in promoting family-based alternative care falls short, at the Deinstitutionalisation Conference in Sofia, at the start of the month. One of the things she brought up in that presentation, was the need for common definitions for different types of alternative care. This is a very important point.

The need for (better) data collection is often brought up, and Jana Hainsworth talked about this too. However, if data is collected, but uses different terms or definitions in different places, it becomes impossible to compare the data over larger areas or between countries or regions. This seriously reduces the value of the collected data.

This was something that I have run into during the research project that led to the report Alternative Care for Children Around the Globe (which you can download for free HERE). This was a problem for me not just when trying to compare data between countries, but even within certain countries. For example, in the UK Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own laws and social care policies, making their data incompatible with each other and also with England and Wales. Canada even reported to the Committee on the Rights of the Child that they were unable to provide national data, because their alternative care system was decentralised and different states used different definitions for things like foster care and residential care.

Between countries, this problem is even greater. Some countries develop their own terminology for different types of alternative care. However, even more confusing is when familiar and widely used terms are suddenly used to indicate different things. For example, there are a number of countries where large-scale residential institutions are referred to as ‘foster care homes’, even though foster care is a term generally used to indicate family-based care. Or in China, where any child who leaves a state-run institution for anything other than adoption (or, theoretically, reintegration) is documented to have gone into ‘foster care’, even though this ‘foster care’ may in fact be an NGO-run large-scale residential institution, rather than actual family-based care. Similarly, there are places where ‘small group homes’ accommodate anything from 15-50 children.

This creates a real problem when you are trying to compare the situation in different places, or are trying to establish policy or guidelines for a region, or are trying to determine quality standards.

Later on during the conference, I had the opportunity to speak further about this with Jana Hainsworth. During that conversation, I was delighted to find out that Eurochild is looking into setting up a research project to get an overview of the definitions used for alternative care elements in Europe and to look into the possibility of providing guidelines for generally accepted definitions.

I have expressed my interest in becoming involved in this project. And I will of course keep you informed for further developments, if I am given that opportunity.

In the next blog, I will write about another point made by Jana Hainsworth.

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