Browsing by Subject "kysely"

The objective of this thesis is to determine how kindergarten teachers experience writing and submitting child welfare notification and any obstacles they perceive while doing so. Both submitted and un-submitted child welfare notifications were studied from the perspective of child welfare legislation, regulations and other guidelines as well as parental partnerships and multi-disciplinary co-operations. This subject has been covered on previous studies by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health on a more general and multidimensional level. However, comparable research for kindergarten teachers’ subjective experiences on the subject have not been published. This study was conducted as an electronic survey with 31 kindergarten teachers participating. All of the respondents were women between 18 and 55 years of age. The data was collected in September 2016 from the Eskariopen Eväspussi Facebook community which had more than 7,000 members at the time. The questionnaire included a variety of structured and open questions and options which were used to measure respondents' opinions and attitudes towards submitting child-protection notifications and reports. Semi-structured questions were analyzed using statistical methods and qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the open questions of the survey. The results revealed that the various procedures developed for assisting in the submitting of a child welfare notification were relatively poorly known. More than one-third of the respondents were not aware of the request for assessing need for child welfare legislation as defined in the Child Welfare Act. Also the internal procedures of day-care centers in making the child welfare report varied greatly with many respondents differing as to whom the final reporting responsibility lay with. As many as 35% of respondents regretted that they had not submitted child protection notification later on. The difficulties that the respondents´ experienced in submitting and deciding not to submit notifications were divided into two main categories; one of which consisted of reasons relating to the parental partnership and the other of child welfare services. The results of the survey indicated the parental partnership related reasons to be more significant. Based on the results of this study it can be concluded that the kindergarten teachers should be encouraged in the submitting of child protection notifications. Practices for making notifications should be clarified, so that the threshold for child protection notification is lowered. Multi-disciplinary collaboration should also be developed. Given the importance of the subject more comprehensive research is needed.