Perceptions of stigma and user involvement in child welfare services

This paper explores the perceptions of social disqualification or 'stigma' that service users attributed to public child welfare services in random sa mples of service users taken from the Netherlands, a part of Spain (Catalon ia) and a part of the United Kingdom (Wales). It was found that, in all thr ee samples, foster and residential care invoked the greatest sense of stigm a, while the health related and the preventive family services were perceiv ed as the least stigmatizing types of public welfare services. Comparative analysis further revealed that a positive attitude towards the use of publi c welfare services, a perception of supportive or non-stigmatizing social n orms regarding the use of such services, and a perception of public welfare services as helpful correlated in all three samples with higher levels of user satisfaction and involvement in the services. It was further found tha t, in the British and Spanish samples, a positive attitude towards public w elfare services, as well as a perception of public welfare services as help ful for their recipients, were the predominating factors promoting higher l evels of satisfactory user involvement in the services, while, in the Dutch sample, a perception of supportive social norms was the factor that most p romoted satisfactory user involvement.