‘Volwassen in één nacht’; Een kwalitatieve studie naar de ervaringen en behoeften van jongeren op een kamertrainingscentrum met betrekking tot de begeleiding van het proces naar volwassenheid

Abstract

Research shows that young adults who have received residential youth care generally have less successful outcomes in various areas of their lives, compared to their peers who have not received residential youth care. A possible reason for this is the acute transition to adulthood that these young people are going through. In addition, many of them do not receive support from the social network and professional help often stops at the age of eighteen. This qualitative study investigated what the experiences and needs of young people from ‘room training centres’ (in Dutch: kamertrainingscentra) themselves are in guiding the transition to adulthood. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people between the ages of eighteen and 26, who had lived in a ‘room training centre’ (n= 15). The aim of this research was to contribute to an improvement of the guidance of the process towards adulthood. An important insight from this research is that many young people have experienced that the preparation in various areas has fallen short. It can be concluded that guidance towards adulthood was experienced by different young people in a very diverse way and that they would have needed different things. This difference in the appreciation of the guidance is in many cases related to the extent to which they felt that there was sincere attention for them. Sincere attention seems to be a precondition for young people to be able to learn something substantive from their counsellors with regard to adulthood.