© British Association of Social Workers
Perceptions of Stigma and User Involvement in Child Welfare Services
Evert Scholte is a senior lecturer in Child Psychology, Leiden University The Netherlands
Matthew Colton is Reader and Head of Applied Social Studies, University of Wales Swansea, UK
Ferran Casas is Director of the Research Institute on Quality of Life, University of Girona Spain
Mark Drakeford is a lecturer in Applied Social Studies at the University of Cardiff Wales
Sue Roberts is a research officer at the University of Wales Swansea, UK
Margaret Williams is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary Canada
Correspondence to Dr E. M. Scholte, Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences/Centre for Research on Youth Welfare, University of Leiden, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands.
Summary
This paper explores the perceptions of social disqualification or ‘stigma’ that service users attributed to public child welfare services in random samples of service users taken from the Netherlands, a part of Spain (Catalonia) and a part of the United Kingdom (Wales). It was found that, in all three samples, foster and residential care invoked the greatest sense of stigma, while the health related and the preventive family services were perceived as the least stigmatizing types of public welfare services. Comparative analysis further revealed that a positive attitude towards the use of public welfare services, a perception of supportive or non-stigmatizing social norms regarding the use of such services, and a perception of public welfare services as helpful correlated in all three samples with higher levels of user satisfaction and involvement in the services. It was further found that, in the British and Spanish samples, a positive attitude towards public welfare services, as well as a perception of public welfare services as helpful for their recipients, were the predominating factors promoting higher levels of satisfactory user involvement in the services, while, in the Dutch sample, a perception of supportive social norms was the factor that most promoted satisfactory user involvement.