”Like barn leikar best”. Ein praxeologisk studie om habilitering av hjelpetrengande barn og unge

This thesis examines social practices in habilitation of children in Norwegian municipalities and specialised health services. The view on and approach to disabled children have changed through time, and the social reality, which seems natural and taken for given, is socially constructed. In our time, habilitation is part of the medical field and is dominated by the logic of medicine legitimised by the state. The thesis seeks new insight through the following research question: Which social practices are created and employed in the meeting between parents and professionals in habilitation of children who are dependent of help, where do these practices come from, and how do they structure the opportunities for parents to get help? The study takes a praxeological approach, which combines the subjectivistic with the objectivistic and thus constructs the research object. The meeting between parents and professionals is understood as social relations, and the thesis breaks with predefined understandings of reality. Data were collected through interviews and questionnaires. Three pairs of parents with disabled children and nine professionals from three municipalities and one habilitation department participated in the study in 2011. The analysis used a theoretical-empirical, reflexive methodology based on the theory and concepts of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s trilogy of habitus and field analysis. The dispositions and social positions of the agents were re-constructed and used to describe and analyse their social practices, in the form of diagnose and monitoring of and research on the children. Then, the field of children who are dependent of help were re-constructed, analysing the power relations between the positions. The field analysis showed that depending on their capital, parents of disabled children are in a more or less dependant and dominated position. Professionals possessing specialised capital related to the medical logic dominate the field. Thus, the historically created power relation between agents in the field of children who are dependent of help structures a relation of domination, where parents with low levels of capital have the greatest social distance to the helpers and the least opportunities to get help