Troubling identities

This paper deals with the everyday lives of children in care at residential treatment schools. The objective is to examine the everyday lives of children placed in a residential treatment school. In this way, the paper contributes to an ethnographic-inspired research field, examining the daily life and goings on at residential institutions.
The paper is based on an ethnographic field study carried out at two residential treatment schools for children aged 6 to 16. The paper takes a symbolic interactionism approach, which means that focus is on examining how meaning is ascribed in the process of social interaction within the field.
The paper examines and uncovers how predominant understandings of and narratives about the problems and needs of vulnerable children are of significance for the patterns of interaction which are established between children and employees within the context of the residential institution. The paper also explores how the children themselves contribute actively to creating a meaningful everyday life at the institution, and how they cope with, and seek to influence, the framework and conditions the institution sets for them. Finally, the paper describes how, like the children, the employees are also influenced by the special framework and conditions characteristic of a residential institution.