Beginning with the Need for Connection and Safety: Examining How Group Home Child and Youth Care Counsellors in Alberta Experience the Enactment of Trauma-Informed Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Trauma-informed care (TIC), an organizational framework aimed at creating healing environments to counteract the effects of trauma, has become an increasingly popular approach within the field of human services. Despite existing research evaluating the effectiveness of TIC in youth group home settings, the direct perspectives of Child and Youth-Care (CYC) Counsellors with this approach remain limited. In the current study, 10 CYC Counsellors in Alberta were interviewed to better understand how they experience TIC in group homes, including barriers and facilitators to implementation. Using Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology in concert with Thematic Analysis, four major themes emerged from the data. Findings indicate that TIC is enacted by CYC Counsellors through a series of processes that begin with an overarching need for connection and safety at all levels of the organization (with leadership, their team, and youth). Only when connection and safety have been established can they then begin to acquire trauma-informed knowledge, develop the appropriate mindset, and perform the trauma-informed behaviours required to enact TIC completely. Recommendations include providing CYC Counsellors with opportunities to have their perspectives and experiences included in the development of organizational policies and practice procedures, structuring TIC training so that CYC Counsellors are guided by experienced professionals, and balancing expectations for care with sufficient resources to enact TIC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".