A few years ago, Robert Frietsch and his team of researchers were puzzled by some of their observations: Why did more and more young people from youth welfare directly end up in homeless assistance? How was it that so many young people who have grown up in foster care or in a children’s home couldn’t quite get a foothold in adult life, despite all the help they were offered?

The answer the scientists found to this question is somewhat sobering: “Statistics show that half of the supporting measures offered by youth welfare services are not effective,” says Frietsch. “The youth welfare facilities and offices do a lot for the young people but they may simply not be doing what is necessary from a psychological perspective.” This is where the HtR_CaL project comes in that Frietsch leads as a professor of social sciences at Koblenz University of Applied Sciences: The project team is developing a standardized “method toolbox”. It is to provide youth welfare facilities and other specialized services with methods to better determine the specific problems and needs of their clients and to attend to them.

In his professional life as a psychologist with a focus on youth welfare and former drug commissioner for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Frietsch has gained a lot of insight into the precarious situations in which adolescents can end up. Young people who are released from youth welfare into an independent life – the so-called care leavers – are particularly at risk: More often than average, they are unable to find a place to live or a steady job, take drugs, and get caught in a dangerous loop of violence and crime.

In order to prevent such biographies, Robert Frietsch says it is necessary not to start with the symptoms, but with the reasons for their development. And these reasons, he explains, are the same for all those affected: the inability to form secure bonds with other people and, as a result, disturbed personality development. However, Frietsch has observed that many youth welfare institutions are unable to do justice to this fact. The bonding difficulties are often inadequately handled or treated, according to the expert.

Breaking up attachment patterns from childhood

Frietsch and his team members Corinna Leißling and Dirk Holbach first approached the topic through analyses and surveys. Their data assessment revealed that in the group of care leavers with major problems – those who may have already been kicked out of several institutions or foster families and are in acute danger of ending up on the streets – only about ten percent showed a secure attachment pattern. The majority of young people in this group rather had anxious-avoidant or indifferent-avoidant attachment patterns, accompanied by low self-esteem or avoidance of closeness to others.

Fortunately, attachment patterns are not set in stone forever: they can be disrupted with suitable methods, but the problems must first be identified correctly. The “method toolbox” that is being put together as part of the project therefore contains both survey methods and suitable training modules. One of the most important instruments is the so-called SOC questionnaire which is used to determine the young people's sense of coherence: Do they perceive their living environment as explicable or rather as chaotic, random, and incomprehensible? Do they feel they can shape and control their own lives? And do they appreciate their lives and their living environment as meaningful?

Comprehending and managing life and perceiving it as meaningful

These three components – briefly summarized as comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness – indicate how urgently a person needs professional support. A stable sense of coherence helps us get through difficult times and crises, while a low SOC score is considered a warning sign of depression or even a suicide problem. Having professionals in youth welfare institutions recognize these warning signs is the first goal of HtR_CaL. The project team has worked through the SOC questionnaire with nearly 200 young people and also trained the first institutions in handling the instrument.

The feedback was remarkable, Frietsch reports: almost all the interviewed youths responded positively and cooperated actively, and the professionals reported back that the HtR_CaL team might have learned more about the young people in the two-hour interviews than the professionals themselves had been able to learn in months. “With SOC, you're asking about a person's experiences and assessments in an interpersonal experience, rather than just quizzing them,” Frietsch explains. “That made the young people feel they were taken seriously and enabled them to reflect on their experiences.”

However, a thorough assessment via SOC score is only the first step on the path to a self-determined and satisfied life. It must be followed by special trainings that help to improve the situation. Another tool in the “method toolbox” therefore is the so-called HEDE training (HEDE stands for “Health-Ease and Dis-Ease”) which has been specially adapted to the needs of care leavers and is designed to teach them how to get through difficult times without serious psychological or physical impairments and how to better use and expand their own potential.

Training is an essential part of the concept

Other than with the SOC questionnaire, however, the enthusiasm of professionals for this instrument is rather limited. Frietsch suspects that in a sector that is characterized by a general shortage of personnel and money the requirements of time and staff act as a deterrent: The HEDE training requires at least two specialists for ten half-day training sessions, and this does not even include the extensive evaluation afterwards. That's a very different ball game from the short interviews for the SOC survey. And yet: “These training sessions, the shared experience, are very important components of working with the young people,” says Frietsch. “You can't do without them.”

Therefore, he will continue to patiently work towards convincing the professionals and to expand the “method toolbox.” A suitable software will later enable the facilities to document results and successes. For the SOC questionnaire, this digital evaluation is already available. However, most of the training development had to pause during the Corona crisis. “Virtual training is possible, but it simply doesn't work as well as classroom training,” Frietsch explains. Work on the project can restart only now, so that HtR_CaL is facing some delay. However, in a year and a half, the “method toolbox” is planned to be well filled and handed over to the partner facilities.

Robert Frietsch and his team hope that the support concept will then quickly make the rounds in youth welfare facilities and give the care leavers a better start to their adult lives: “If we can prevent even a few young people from our target group from slipping into homelessness or criminality, then HtR_CaL has been a success.”