Exploring the relationship between subjective well-being and emotional and behavioural disorders in children in residential care

Children who live in residential care have suffered experiences of abuse and neglect. Furthermore, many of them have grown in families characterized by family problems such as poverty, mental health problems, drug abuse, etc.... [ view full abstract ]

Children who live in residential care have suffered experiences of abuse and neglect. Furthermore, many of them have grown in families characterized by family problems such as poverty, mental health problems, drug abuse, etc. As a consequence, research has shown the higher frequency of mental health problems in this group. There are several international evidences that suggest the high prevalence of mental health problems in children in residential care, but there has been very little research in this issue in Spain. Likewise, the research has shown low levels of well-being in these samples.

Our main objective is to describe the relationship between emotional and behavioural problems and subjective well-being in a sample of 719 adolescents aged 11 to 18 in residential care. Another objective of this presentation is to explore other variables associated with different in levels of well-being in these samples such as age, gender or aspects related to protective intervention process. The research was designed as follows: a) Basic descriptive information about children was collected by key-social educator b) in order to identify mental health problems we applied two version of the ASEBA System: the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and the Youth Self-Report (YSR). The CBCL is the version for parents and was completed by key-social educator for each child in this study c) In order to analyse the well-being Personal Well-Being Index (PWI) was applied. PWI included 7 items which evaluate the satisfaction with different life domains (Cummins et al., 2003). We applied the Spanish version published by Casas (Casa et al., 2013). Furthermore, we have added five items associated with specific life aspects of the children in residential care.

Some of the results obtained show a high incidence of clinical problems on the screening. Furthermore, the values of well-being were lower than general population with lowest scores in future and residential resource. Results showed gender and age differences: girls show lower scores in almost all areas than boys and older age is related with less satisfaction in all areas. Another significant result was that children who had been in residential care for several years reported less satisfaction with family and more satisfaction with residential resource. Finally, the analysis shows significant differences between cases with mental health problems and cases without problems according to screening. These differences are more significant when the information is given by the own adolescent.

These results confirmed the prevalence of emotional and behavioural problems according to the screening criteria and their impact on the well-being in children in residential care. Our finding provided important implications in this field of intervention.