A Narrative Analysis of Selected Street Children Running Away from Institutional Care : a religious based organization

Abstract

Street children and runaways are global phenomena that occur as a serious problem worldwide. In this project research, it explores the topic of street children running away from home facilities in the context of children in Manila, Philippines. This research is a narrative analysis that focuses on both the behaviour and the preceding circumstances of children that run away from residential home care facilities. This research poses the questions of (1) why and how do these adolescents run away from the institutions? (2) What are the opportunities these adolescents find outside the institution? (3) What kind of relationship would these adolescents hope to build and develop in the society? This is an empirical study in selected two Christian residential care institutions and has been conducted with the use of qualitative research methods, such as observation, in-depth interviews and field note taking. An observation method is used to get acquainted with the staff, observe adolescents’ behaviour and their activities. And the primary data is collected through interviews, using semi-structured interviews. Snowballing and purposive sampling has been used to select the participants in this study. The qualitative empirical data is gathered from the two home care facilities that caters to thirty and 54 children respectively. The fact that the two institutions are religious based, the study seeks to interrogate the perspectives on behaviour not on the nature of the institution. The methodological approach underlines each participant’s experiences and their behaviours explain the occurrence of the phenomenon of running away. This study employed three theories namely, psychosocial development theory, cognitive development theory, and social bond theory. There were five collected themes that emerged from the gathered data specifically: (1) the pursuit to autonomy/freedom, (2) friends and peer influence, (3) personal gratification, (4) poverty and economic factor, and (5) substance use; and two sub-themes: (1) religious roles and spiritual factors and (2) sexual exploitation. The main findings are synthesized by using the most condensed literatures and theories relevant to the study after data has been collected through several observations and interviews.