Tarja Pösö
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 375108 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Tarja Pösö |
| NOMBRES | Tarja |
| APELLIDO | Pösö |
| FIRMA | PÖSÖ T |
| AFILIACIONES | Tampere University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8695-7222 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 153 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Using vignettes to compare the views of social workers and service-users
While vignette studies have become more prevalent in social work research, it is, however, uncommon to include both practitioners and service-users in the research design to provide their views on an identical case. In this article, the aim is both to reflect on the usefulness of the vignette method in exploring assessments of the needs for services from the points of view of practitioners and service-users and to explore empirically those views …
What About Their Future? An Analysis of Child Protection Systems' Focus on the Future of Newborn Children in Care Order Decisions
This article examines whether and how governments and child protection systems consider the future of infants when making care order decisions. Infants' placements can be long‐term, so it is important to understand how the child's future is discussed—both generally and in relation to becoming an adult who can participate in society and live independently. The empirical analysis draws on unique data from new‐born removal judgements ( n = 216), cov…
Ask the children
Peer reviewed
Promoting the rights of infants in care
Child rights belong to all children under the age of 18. However, the recognition of infants as rights holders still challenges many practices in child welfare. This article focuses on infants’ rights in alternative care and explores them through the views of the practitioners who are involved in developing – and advocating – rights-based alternative care in Finland. Based on 15 interviews with foster carers, social workers and other practitioner…
Licence Loss
With placement in residential care, society assumes overall responsibility for a child's daily care, well‐being and development. How public authorities respond to poor care quality is of crucial importance. To guarantee quality care and minimise risks, welfare states increasingly develop different mechanisms and systems to supervise out‐of‐home care. In this article, we analyse how central inspectorates in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden deal…
Care Order Decisions—in the Domain of Social Work or the Courts? Social Workers’ Frontline Views
This article examines social workers’ views on care order decisions in Finnish child welfare where the decision-making procedure takes place in either the social work or court domain depending on the parties’ consent or objection to the care order proposal. Exploring this parallel decision-making system provides insights into the less studied characteristics of non-adversarial decision-making compared with those of adversarial decision-making. Ba…
Children’s consent to child welfare services
In this article, children consenting to a care order proposal is explored as a form of meaningful participation as seen by care‐experienced young people. In contrast to health care and research ethics, almost no research exists on children's consent to child welfare measures. The findings suggest that instead of approaching children as individualistic rights‐holders, a more relational understanding about consenting is required, both conceptually …
Family relatedness
This article examines children’s and parents’ positions as rights holders and family members in child welfare decision making as seen by social workers who prepare child removal decisions. The study is based on qualitative interviews with social workers, each of which includes the story of one child’s case. The interviews were conducted in Finland, where the consent or objection expressed by parents and children of a certain age determine the dec…
The Invisible Child
We know little about how children are portrayed in care order cases. Using a Child Equality Perspective ( cep ), which demands the child’s presence in proceedings even for children who are not capable of partaking fully in the decision-making process, we examine a sample of 216 judgments from 8 countries involving 220 infants. Our study reveals that the children remain largely invisible, but with clear country differences. Children’s invisibility…
Social workers’ views about children’s and parents’ competence in child protection decision-making
Competence is an essential part of any decision-making process. In child protection, it is challenged by the controversial nature of child removals and the vulnerable situations which children and parents experience therein. This article examines how and on what grounds social workers view parents and children to be competent to give their informed view in care order proceedings and what they do if doubts about competence arise. The analysis is b…
Informed consent’ in consensual child welfare
The article examines the nature of consent in the context of Finnish care order decision-making as described by social workers, parents and young people, all personally involved in care order decision-making, albeit in different roles: on the one hand, an authority asking for the view about a child removal, and on the other, a party expressing a view which has huge legal, social and moral implications for their family relations. Based on qualitat…
Are child protection workers and judges in alignment with citizens when considering interventions into a family? A cross-country study of four jurisdictions
Child welfare removal of infants
The documented layer of children's rights in care order decision‐making
The recognition of children as rights holders is a true challenge for any policy and practice that involves children, but it is even more so for making decisions about taking children into care. This article departs from the view that when children are perceived as bearers of rights, this should also be reflected in the institutional documents of decision‐making. That is why the documented layer of decisions about taking a child into care is exam…
Children in immediate danger
This paper presents a qualitative analysis of front‐line practices regarding emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection. It examines how the responses to children's immediate danger are framed by legislation and how front‐line practitioners assess the child's situation and make emergency placement decisions. The data consist of interviews with 16 Irish and 33 Finnish social workers. These child welfare protection systems respond dif…
International Perspectives on Child-responsive Courts
Child friendly justice and access to justice for children are explicit concerns for the European Union, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Council of Europe and the Child Rights International Network. This study examines court systems as child-responsive by eliciting the views of judicial decision makers on child protection cases (n = 1,479) in four legal systems (England, Finland, Norway and the USA (represented by California)), based…
Anne Stafford, Nigel Parton, Sharon Vincent and Connie Smith
Book Review: Anne Stafford, Nigel Parton, Sharon Vincent and Connie Smith: Child Protection Systems in the United Kingdom : A Comparative Analysis
Care order templates as institutional scripts in child protection
The Representation of Children’s Views in Finnish Court Decisions Regarding Care Orders
The article examines the representation of children’s views in Finnish court decisions regarding care orders. It explores how written court decisions recognise, address and use children’s views in care order decisions and compares the results with a similar study conducted in Norway. In the literature, both countries are portrayed as having a child-orientated child welfare system. Based on the analysis of 36 court decisions in Finland, it is argu…
A multifaceted risk analysis of fathers’ self‐reported physical violence toward their children
Existing research has shown that child maltreatment is carried out by both mothers and fathers. There is also an extensive body of literature analyzing reasons for mothers' violent behavior. Among fathers, reasons are less well studied, resulting in the lack of a comprehensive picture of paternal child abuse. In this study, 20 child-, parent-, and family-related factors have been included in a combined analysis to assess which of these may pose a…
Social Workers and Independent Experts in Child Protection Decision Making
This paper draws on an international comparative study of social work decision making in cases that are on the edge of care order proceedings, involving child protection workers from Finland, Norway, England and the USA (California). It focuses on workers’ responses in an online questionnaire to questions about the use of independent experts to inform their decisions about whether or not to take a case to court. All the countries try to avoid tak…
Parents' involvement in care order decisions
This article examines parents' involvement in care order decision‐making in four countries at one particular point in the care order process, namely, when the child protection worker discusses with the parents his or her considerations regarding child removal. The countries represent different child welfare systems with Norway and Finland categorized as ‘family service systems’ and the USA as a ‘child protection system’, with England somewhere in…
Time in care
This article addresses the ‘temporal black box’ of care by exploring how children and social workers view the first months in care. Although practice and policy are built on time in different ways (for example, long- and short-term care), very little attention has so far been given to the different temporalities included in care. The focus here is on interpretative practices of addressing time instead of describing the use of time or measuring it…
The formalized framework for decision-making in child protection care orders
Care orders within the child protection system are some of the most invasive interventions a state can make. This article examines the discretionary space governments set out for child protection workers when they prepare care orders. We analyse the formalized framework for these decisions in England, Finland, Norway and the United States. We focus on knowledge, timelines, how children and parents are involved and accountability. We find that Nor…
Holistic, expert and centralised models for organising care placement decisions
This article examines the organisational models of decision-making regarding care placements in child welfare. Many countries currently report reorganising and economising their services and greater use of independent and voluntary agencies, all of which will have a direct and indirect influence on placement decisions about children in care. Very little is known about how public authorities make these decisions, what processes achieve the best op…
Child protection systems within the Danish, Finnish and Norwegian welfare states—time for a child centric approach
This article explores the relationship between the child protection systems and the Nordic welfare state in Denmark, Finland and Norway. Despite an ideological focus on prevention and provision of a fair amount of universal services and in-home child protection services for families and children, there is, nevertheless, a relatively high number of children in the child protection system, even children placed out of their home. The outcome of chil…
The formalized framework for decision-making in child protection care orders
Care orders within the child protection system are some of the most invasive interventions a state can make. This article examines the discretionary space governments set out for child protection workers when they prepare care orders. We analyse the formalized framework for these decisions in England, Finland, Norway and the United States. We focus on knowledge, timelines, how children and parents are involved and accountability. We find that Nor…
Parents' involvement in care order decisions
This article examines parents' involvement in care order decision‐making in four countries at one particular point in the care order process, namely, when the child protection worker discusses with the parents his or her considerations regarding child removal. The countries represent different child welfare systems with Norway and Finland categorized as ‘family service systems’ and the USA as a ‘child protection system’, with England somewhere in…
What is child protection? Historical and methodological issues in comparative research on lastensuojelu /child protection
This article addresses comparative research on what has come to be called, in (British) English, ‘child protection’ or, rather differently, in Finnish ‘ lastensuojelu ’. In developing a cross‐national research project on lastensuojelu /child protection practices in England and Finland, we found it necessary to go back a few steps, to address what might usually be considered as ‘background issues’. This article discusses the welfare state traditio…
Children in immediate danger
This paper presents a qualitative analysis of front‐line practices regarding emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection. It examines how the responses to children's immediate danger are framed by legislation and how front‐line practitioners assess the child's situation and make emergency placement decisions. The data consist of interviews with 16 Irish and 33 Finnish social workers. These child welfare protection systems respond dif…
The Representation of Children’s Views in Finnish Court Decisions Regarding Care Orders
The article examines the representation of children’s views in Finnish court decisions regarding care orders. It explores how written court decisions recognise, address and use children’s views in care order decisions and compares the results with a similar study conducted in Norway. In the literature, both countries are portrayed as having a child-orientated child welfare system. Based on the analysis of 36 court decisions in Finland, it is argu…
Matching children and substitute homes
Matching describes the process of selecting the substitute home for a child who needs to be placed away from the care of his/her birth parents. However, very little theorizing is done about matching and there is also a lack of systematic investigation into models of practice currently in use. Most importantly, very little is known about front‐line matching practices in different socio‐historical child welfare contexts. This paper aims to explore …
Are child protection workers and judges in alignment with citizens when considering interventions into a family? A cross-country study of four jurisdictions
Five years in care
Child welfare practice is temporally structured and includes a variety of follow‐up activities. Practice‐based follow‐up has not, however, been much explored when studying children's paths in the child welfare system. This paper is based on a study of children (103) who were taken into care in 2006 in 10 F innish municipalities and their paths in care until 2011. The social workers' institutional knowledge of their ‘own’ clients comprises the cor…
Translation as a knowledge transformation practice—the ambiguous case of presenting Finnish child welfare in English
This article addresses the process of translation, necessary in the present social work academic and practice communities, as a form of transformation of knowledge. It is argued that knowledge is transformed in the translation process on the terms set by the language into which it is translated. As the English language is the lingua franca of the present academic and other international communities, it is the English language that sets the criter…
Sensitive Issues in Vulnerable Conditions
This article discusses the experiences of the ethical dilemmas encountered in a research project on teenage reformatory school residents’ understanding of violence.The study is based on group interviews of teenage youth (15 interview sessions) in two Finnish reformatory schools.The agenda for the interviews dealt with the adolescents’views on violence, experiences of it in different contexts such as home, school and residential care, as well as t…
Child welfare removal of infants
International Perspectives on Child-responsive Courts
Child friendly justice and access to justice for children are explicit concerns for the European Union, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Council of Europe and the Child Rights International Network. This study examines court systems as child-responsive by eliciting the views of judicial decision makers on child protection cases (n = 1,479) in four legal systems (England, Finland, Norway and the USA (represented by California)), based…
Hesitation as a System Response to Children Exposed to Violence
The article aims to explore how certain social welfare, health and education institutions and the police respond to children exposed to violence. In particular, it focuses on how the institutions interact with each other in terms of informing one another about violence targeted at children or the suspicion of it, as suggested by present Finnish legislation. Based on interviews with 33 practitioners, the analysis highlights hesitation as a common …
Number of Children Placed Outside the Home as an Indicator – Social and Moral Implications of Commensuration
The article explores what goes into one particular child indicator – children placed outside their home – and how it makes its object of description knowable and governable. This indicator is widely used in the making of social policy as a follow‐up and performance indicator and is applied also in social research, including cross‐national comparisons, to recognize problems and their scope, especially with reference to child welfare. The indicator…
Focus groups and the study of violence
The article examines the focus group method as a tool to study violence in youth residential care based on an empirical study of 38 young people in two Finnish reform schools. The key issue here is to reflect upon the processes of knowledge production as we trace the ways in which the institutional and situational context and the very form of focus groups affect the ways of talking about violence. Special attention is given to strong and weak the…
On the margin? Residential child care in Scotland and Finland
Situated on the margins of Europe, Scotland and Finland are small countries which share similar demographic and economic profiles. In many European countries, residential child care can also be considered to be ‘on the margin’ of child care provision; there is ambivalence about residential care and a view that it should be used as a last resort. This paper examines systems and practices of residential care in Scotland and Finland, locating these …
Informed consent’ in consensual child welfare
The article examines the nature of consent in the context of Finnish care order decision-making as described by social workers, parents and young people, all personally involved in care order decision-making, albeit in different roles: on the one hand, an authority asking for the view about a child removal, and on the other, a party expressing a view which has huge legal, social and moral implications for their family relations. Based on qualitat…
The documented layer of children's rights in care order decision‐making
The recognition of children as rights holders is a true challenge for any policy and practice that involves children, but it is even more so for making decisions about taking children into care. This article departs from the view that when children are perceived as bearers of rights, this should also be reflected in the institutional documents of decision‐making. That is why the documented layer of decisions about taking a child into care is exam…
A multifaceted risk analysis of fathers’ self‐reported physical violence toward their children
Existing research has shown that child maltreatment is carried out by both mothers and fathers. There is also an extensive body of literature analyzing reasons for mothers' violent behavior. Among fathers, reasons are less well studied, resulting in the lack of a comprehensive picture of paternal child abuse. In this study, 20 child-, parent-, and family-related factors have been included in a combined analysis to assess which of these may pose a…
Ambiguous position of the child in supervised meetings
The paper addresses the ambiguous nature of supervised meetings between children and their non‐residential parent(s) which, according to the current legal idea, should serve the best interest of the child. In Finland the meetings between the child and the non‐residential parent can be ordered supervised if there are justified grounds for assuming that they constitute a risk for the child's safety. In many parts of Europe the need for such kinds o…
Social Workers and Independent Experts in Child Protection Decision Making
This paper draws on an international comparative study of social work decision making in cases that are on the edge of care order proceedings, involving child protection workers from Finland, Norway, England and the USA (California). It focuses on workers’ responses in an online questionnaire to questions about the use of independent experts to inform their decisions about whether or not to take a case to court. All the countries try to avoid tak…
Time in care
This article addresses the ‘temporal black box’ of care by exploring how children and social workers view the first months in care. Although practice and policy are built on time in different ways (for example, long- and short-term care), very little attention has so far been given to the different temporalities included in care. The focus here is on interpretative practices of addressing time instead of describing the use of time or measuring it…
Memories about the Intercountry Adoption of Finnish Children
Tarja Pösö uses memory work with professionals to examine the intercountry adoption of Finnish children that took place from the 1950s to the 1970s. Since then, however, Finland has been a receiving country for children adopted from abroad and even the domestic adoption of those born in Finland is rare. The aim of the study is to shed light on the time, space and culture-bound character of child protection and intercountry adoption. The data cons…
Sensitive Issues in Vulnerable Conditions
This article discusses the experiences of the ethical dilemmas encountered in a research project on teenage reformatory school residents’ understanding of violence.The study is based on group interviews of teenage youth (15 interview sessions) in two Finnish reformatory schools.The agenda for the interviews dealt with the adolescents’views on violence, experiences of it in different contexts such as home, school and residential care, as well as t…
What is child protection? Historical and methodological issues in comparative research on lastensuojelu /child protection
This article addresses comparative research on what has come to be called, in (British) English, ‘child protection’ or, rather differently, in Finnish ‘ lastensuojelu ’. In developing a cross‐national research project on lastensuojelu /child protection practices in England and Finland, we found it necessary to go back a few steps, to address what might usually be considered as ‘background issues’. This article discusses the welfare state traditio…
On the margin? Residential child care in Scotland and Finland
Situated on the margins of Europe, Scotland and Finland are small countries which share similar demographic and economic profiles. In many European countries, residential child care can also be considered to be ‘on the margin’ of child care provision; there is ambivalence about residential care and a view that it should be used as a last resort. This paper examines systems and practices of residential care in Scotland and Finland, locating these …
Ambiguous position of the child in supervised meetings
The paper addresses the ambiguous nature of supervised meetings between children and their non‐residential parent(s) which, according to the current legal idea, should serve the best interest of the child. In Finland the meetings between the child and the non‐residential parent can be ordered supervised if there are justified grounds for assuming that they constitute a risk for the child's safety. In many parts of Europe the need for such kinds o…
Focus groups and the study of violence
The article examines the focus group method as a tool to study violence in youth residential care based on an empirical study of 38 young people in two Finnish reform schools. The key issue here is to reflect upon the processes of knowledge production as we trace the ways in which the institutional and situational context and the very form of focus groups affect the ways of talking about violence. Special attention is given to strong and weak the…
Memories about the Intercountry Adoption of Finnish Children
Tarja Pösö uses memory work with professionals to examine the intercountry adoption of Finnish children that took place from the 1950s to the 1970s. Since then, however, Finland has been a receiving country for children adopted from abroad and even the domestic adoption of those born in Finland is rare. The aim of the study is to shed light on the time, space and culture-bound character of child protection and intercountry adoption. The data cons…
Revisiting Residential Care
In this article, 'revisiting' refers to a variety of ways in which the researcher visits the research site again and in which the relations between the first and later visits are given some consideration substantially and methodologically. Revisiting may be done either for testing and/or enriching existing knowledge. It is claimed that time-aware research is needed in social work especially now when postmodern notions of continuous change are com…
Children’s Experiences of Completing a Computer-Based Violence Survey
This article aims to contribute to the discussion about the ethics of research on children when studying sensitive issues such as violence. The empirical analysis is based on the accounts given by children (11 377) who completed a computer-based questionnaire about their experiences of violence (‘The Finnish Child Victim Survey 2008’) and their reflections on the survey. We argue that experiences of violence should not be excluded from the resear…
Child protection systems within the Danish, Finnish and Norwegian welfare states—time for a child centric approach
This article explores the relationship between the child protection systems and the Nordic welfare state in Denmark, Finland and Norway. Despite an ideological focus on prevention and provision of a fair amount of universal services and in-home child protection services for families and children, there is, nevertheless, a relatively high number of children in the child protection system, even children placed out of their home. The outcome of chil…
Five years in care
Child welfare practice is temporally structured and includes a variety of follow‐up activities. Practice‐based follow‐up has not, however, been much explored when studying children's paths in the child welfare system. This paper is based on a study of children (103) who were taken into care in 2006 in 10 F innish municipalities and their paths in care until 2011. The social workers' institutional knowledge of their ‘own’ clients comprises the cor…
Translation as a knowledge transformation practice—the ambiguous case of presenting Finnish child welfare in English
This article addresses the process of translation, necessary in the present social work academic and practice communities, as a form of transformation of knowledge. It is argued that knowledge is transformed in the translation process on the terms set by the language into which it is translated. As the English language is the lingua franca of the present academic and other international communities, it is the English language that sets the criter…
Matching children and substitute homes
Matching describes the process of selecting the substitute home for a child who needs to be placed away from the care of his/her birth parents. However, very little theorizing is done about matching and there is also a lack of systematic investigation into models of practice currently in use. Most importantly, very little is known about front‐line matching practices in different socio‐historical child welfare contexts. This paper aims to explore …
Hesitation as a System Response to Children Exposed to Violence
The article aims to explore how certain social welfare, health and education institutions and the police respond to children exposed to violence. In particular, it focuses on how the institutions interact with each other in terms of informing one another about violence targeted at children or the suspicion of it, as suggested by present Finnish legislation. Based on interviews with 33 practitioners, the analysis highlights hesitation as a common …
Number of Children Placed Outside the Home as an Indicator – Social and Moral Implications of Commensuration
The article explores what goes into one particular child indicator – children placed outside their home – and how it makes its object of description knowable and governable. This indicator is widely used in the making of social policy as a follow‐up and performance indicator and is applied also in social research, including cross‐national comparisons, to recognize problems and their scope, especially with reference to child welfare. The indicator…
Time in care
This article addresses the ‘temporal black box’ of care by exploring how children and social workers view the first months in care. Although practice and policy are built on time in different ways (for example, long- and short-term care), very little attention has so far been given to the different temporalities included in care. The focus here is on interpretative practices of addressing time instead of describing the use of time or measuring it…
The formalized framework for decision-making in child protection care orders
Care orders within the child protection system are some of the most invasive interventions a state can make. This article examines the discretionary space governments set out for child protection workers when they prepare care orders. We analyse the formalized framework for these decisions in England, Finland, Norway and the United States. We focus on knowledge, timelines, how children and parents are involved and accountability. We find that Nor…
Holistic, expert and centralised models for organising care placement decisions
This article examines the organisational models of decision-making regarding care placements in child welfare. Many countries currently report reorganising and economising their services and greater use of independent and voluntary agencies, all of which will have a direct and indirect influence on placement decisions about children in care. Very little is known about how public authorities make these decisions, what processes achieve the best op…
Parents' involvement in care order decisions
This article examines parents' involvement in care order decision‐making in four countries at one particular point in the care order process, namely, when the child protection worker discusses with the parents his or her considerations regarding child removal. The countries represent different child welfare systems with Norway and Finland categorized as ‘family service systems’ and the USA as a ‘child protection system’, with England somewhere in…
The Representation of Children’s Views in Finnish Court Decisions Regarding Care Orders
The article examines the representation of children’s views in Finnish court decisions regarding care orders. It explores how written court decisions recognise, address and use children’s views in care order decisions and compares the results with a similar study conducted in Norway. In the literature, both countries are portrayed as having a child-orientated child welfare system. Based on the analysis of 36 court decisions in Finland, it is argu…
A multifaceted risk analysis of fathers’ self‐reported physical violence toward their children
Existing research has shown that child maltreatment is carried out by both mothers and fathers. There is also an extensive body of literature analyzing reasons for mothers' violent behavior. Among fathers, reasons are less well studied, resulting in the lack of a comprehensive picture of paternal child abuse. In this study, 20 child-, parent-, and family-related factors have been included in a combined analysis to assess which of these may pose a…
Social Workers and Independent Experts in Child Protection Decision Making
This paper draws on an international comparative study of social work decision making in cases that are on the edge of care order proceedings, involving child protection workers from Finland, Norway, England and the USA (California). It focuses on workers’ responses in an online questionnaire to questions about the use of independent experts to inform their decisions about whether or not to take a case to court. All the countries try to avoid tak…
Children in immediate danger
This paper presents a qualitative analysis of front‐line practices regarding emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection. It examines how the responses to children's immediate danger are framed by legislation and how front‐line practitioners assess the child's situation and make emergency placement decisions. The data consist of interviews with 16 Irish and 33 Finnish social workers. These child welfare protection systems respond dif…
International Perspectives on Child-responsive Courts
Child friendly justice and access to justice for children are explicit concerns for the European Union, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Council of Europe and the Child Rights International Network. This study examines court systems as child-responsive by eliciting the views of judicial decision makers on child protection cases (n = 1,479) in four legal systems (England, Finland, Norway and the USA (represented by California)), based…
Anne Stafford, Nigel Parton, Sharon Vincent and Connie Smith
Book Review: Anne Stafford, Nigel Parton, Sharon Vincent and Connie Smith: Child Protection Systems in the United Kingdom : A Comparative Analysis
Care order templates as institutional scripts in child protection
Political science (33 obras) · Psychology (30 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Child Abuse and Trauma (24 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Welfare (21 obras) · Sociology (19 obras) · Social Psychology (18 obras) · Social Work Education and Practice (17 obras) · Business (16 obras)