Implementación y evaluación del Programa PLANEA de entrenamiento en habilidades para la vida independiente de jóvenes en acogimiento residencial

Abstract

This thesis pursued a double objective. On the one hand, it aimed to develop, implement and evaluate a life skills training program for young people in children’s homes. On the other hand, it aimed to develop and study the psychometric properties of a series of life skills and personal autonomy assessment instruments. The Planea Program is a simple and flexible work method to be used within the individual educational relationship between young people and care workers through a set of activities hosted on an online platform. It includes 9 content areas and more than 280 activities. Planea was piloted with 22 young people and their key residential care workers prior to its implementation in a total of 47 homes and autonomy programs in Castilla-La Mancha, which registered 204 young people (58.3% boys) aged 14-18 years (M = 16.4; SD = 0.83) at the program, of which 37.3% were unaccompanied migrant young people (UMYP). The evaluation of the pilot application and supervision of the implementation of Planea Program showed promising evidence on its suitability for the development of independent living skills, highlighting its flexibility to adapt the intervention to the needs of each young person. Likewise, lines of improvement of the proposed activities and potential barriers to consider in their implementation were detected, both regarding access for young people with specific profiles (UMYP, young people with intellectual disabilities, etc.), as well as a lack of human and material resources, or regarding restrictive policies for autonomy in children’s homes. The PLANEA Instruments for the assessment of independent living skills and personal autonomy were developed and validated through a study in which 1168 young people aged 14-27 (M = 17.63; SD = 2.22) participated, of which 58.9% were women. Of these, 474 lived in children’s homes or supporter accommodation for care leavers, while the rest were young people from the general population. This system includes the PLANEA Independent Life Skills Scale, composed by 36 items organized in three factors, a 9-item short version (PLANEA-9) and a personal autonomy scale (PLANEA-T) composed by 8 items organized in two factors. Both have shown satisfactory evidence of reliability, validity and discriminative capacity in their versions for young people and for residential care staff. Care-experienced young people reported more skills and autonomy than their peers without this experience in some of the domains evaluated, but they showed less self-efficacy in the years before coming of age. The girls, regardless of their group, showed greater skills in the domains of self-care and daily autonomy at home. The perspectives of the care-experienced group about their preparation were always more optimistic than those of the staff, with variations depending on the relationship of the professional with each young person. Likewise, UMYP showed higher levels of skills in the domains of employment and independent living, but no differences were observed based on gender. Youth in supported accommodation showed the highest levels of skills and autonomy, followed by youth in children’s homes specific for adolescents and for UMYP. The lowest levels of abilities were reported by young people in therapeutic residential care homes. This thesis constitutes an important contribution to practice related to the preparation and support of young people in transition to independent living from children’s homes, this being one of the main current challenges for the child care system. Their findings inform the development, implementation, and evaluation of tools with similar purposes.