Identifying Deficiencies in Children's Residential Care in Finland: Inspectors' Views on Working With Information

Abstract

Abusive and illegal practices in residential care are a recognised issue in child welfare internationally; thus, the question of how these institutions are supervised is important. However, children's residential care is complex by nature, making its supervision a challenging task. This article examines residential care supervision by looking at the ‘knowledge work’ that two central legality supervisors in Finland—the Parliamentary Ombudsman and Regional State Administrative Agencies—conduct when inspecting children's residential homes. Here, ‘knowledge work’ refers to the process of working with information to identify deficiencies in care. Eleven interviews and 16 inspection reports are analysed with a focus on the nature of the information that these supervisors gather when inspecting residential units and how they evaluate the significance and reliability of the information. The results show that to complete their institutional task, the inspectors gather information from various sources, including documents and interviews with children. The significance of the information is then assessed by comparing it with legislation and the supervisory mandate, and its reliability is verified by considering the diverse information sources as a whole collection of information. The results suggest that how well ‘knowledge work’ is conducted highly affects the impact of supervision.