Conceptual meanings of permanency: photovoice with care-experienced youth

Children in out-of-home care have a developmental need for safe and secure relationships to meet their long-term social, emotional and physical needs. Permanency has been a guiding principle in child protection since the mid-1970s, with the focus on creating legal and residential certainty. Permanency is a complex felt and lived experience for children and young people that cannot be reduced to a single dimension, such as legal permanency. A critical gap exists in understanding the perspective of young people and using research methods such as Photovoice that facilitate expression of intangible concepts. Eleven care-experienced young people aged 16 to 25 years took part in participatory research in New South Wales. Participants used photography to explore literal and metaphorical experiences of permanency and thematic analysis was used to interpret visual and textual data. The results present a more nuanced picture of permanency as an internal state and reveal that young people actively cultivate the felt sense of security and belonging in their lives through connection with nature, people and culture. Photovoice empowers participants as co-creators of knowledge and presents new insights to inform public discourse and policy and practice developments.