In the book “Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness”, Naomi Nicholas discusses an institutional ethnography and community based research. This research took place at at youth emergency shelter called “Street Youth Shelter” (SYS) over the course of one year in Ontario.
In the introduction of the book, Nicholas outlines the main points of her research that took place at SYS. She discussed how she adopted the term “youth work” from the book and how governmentality helped gear her study. In each chapter Nicholas does a great job ending it with a clear overview of what points she was trying to make in the chapter and also her thoughts on those points. Chapter one is one of the strongest areas in the book where she provides a reflection of where she is going to conduct the research, which is SYS, and also what methods she is going to use. Nicholas gives a very detailed description of what SYS looks like and and of some of the participants she worked with from the shelter as well. As mentioned before, the research was conducted over the course of one year with 27 formal interviews from the young people in the shelter and 14 interviews from the adults that worked with the young people from shelter over the course of the time that they were there. …show more content…
She argues that despite the work of these professionals, accountability and risk management overrules their responding to the needs of young people. Nichols points out the dangers of “cover your ass work”, which is intended to protect a worker’s or organization’s professional reputation instead of actually protecting the needs of young people who are in need of stable housing. The gathering of data is used as evidence to determine whether professionals and agencies are doing their jobs to protect the needs of young people, rather than just improving the services for young
In the introduction of the book, Nicholas outlines the main points of her research that took place at SYS. She discussed how she adopted the term “youth work” from the book and how governmentality helped gear her study. In each chapter Nicholas does a great job ending it with a clear overview of what points she was trying to make in the chapter and also her thoughts on those points. Chapter one is one of the strongest areas in the book where she provides a reflection of where she is going to conduct the research, which is SYS, and also what methods she is going to use. Nicholas gives a very detailed description of what SYS looks like and and of some of the participants she worked with from the shelter as well. As mentioned before, the research was conducted over the course of one year with 27 formal interviews from the young people in the shelter and 14 interviews from the adults that worked with the young people from shelter over the course of the time that they were there. …show more content…
She argues that despite the work of these professionals, accountability and risk management overrules their responding to the needs of young people. Nichols points out the dangers of “cover your ass work”, which is intended to protect a worker’s or organization’s professional reputation instead of actually protecting the needs of young people who are in need of stable housing. The gathering of data is used as evidence to determine whether professionals and agencies are doing their jobs to protect the needs of young people, rather than just improving the services for young