From open and straightforward accounts of residential care workers, The Occupational Experience of Residential Child and Youth Care Workers shows you how care is handled, not how it should be handled. This book introduces you to a social reality, a sometimes very difficult and challenging social reality, as it is viewed by its participants. If you want to know more about what is actually going on in residential care and the discontent that workers frequently experience, this is the book that lays out the facts, the problems, and the nature of residential youth centers.

The Occupational Experience of Residential Child and Youth Care Workers broaches the problem of tension between workers and residents and hopes that bringing the problem out into the open will be a first step toward a solution. You learn that the very arrangement of residential care automatically sets up antagonism between the sole group care worker and his/her wards; residents tend to resist the inherently coercive efforts of the worker who tries to bring them through processes of change and socialization. The Occupational Experience of Residential Child and Youth Care Workers will make you think about:

• residential care and conflicts
• group interaction
• career satisfaction and dissatisfaction
• interpretive sociology of education and its methodology
• social control

Interviews with Israeli residential care workers are presented to help you understand the circumstances under which residential care providers experience discontent, or job dissatisfaction. You learn which workers are most likely to feel discontented and how staff members cope with the stress and discontent they experience. Youth care workers, policymakers, child-care staff recruiters, supervisors, and trainers will find this book sheds much light on the problem of discontent and the need to make child and youth care facilities more humane for residents and staff alike. It will also help social work educators and researchers in sociology, social work, and the social psychology of education get in touch with what goes on inside the walls of residential care centers.