The main purpose of this study is to research about how the staff at a residental care home strives to make the unaccompanied youths feel like they are a part of the society in Sweden. The purpose is also to explain how the staff at the care home legitimises their integrating actions. To accomplish the purpose, a qualitative approach was made; four staffs and three youths were interviewed at a care home in the southern part of Sweden. The theoretical approach were: social integration and social exclusion. The theoretical concepts in this study were: rules, norms, social norms and moral norms. The findings of this study was that the staff, mentors and the guardians of the youths were people that helped them understand the ”new” society by teaching them the mutual norms, values and attitudes in the society. The norms, rules and routines that were taught at the care home, were interpreted as social and moral norms that sets the framework of a ”correct behavior” in a given situation. To make the system of norms appear as legitimate to the youths, the staff explained why the norms are important to internalize as well as explaining what could happen if you would go against them. In this way, the youths corrected their behavior in relation to what the staff mediated and to what they thought was important themselves. To understand how the society works, including learning the norms, values and behaviours, were according to the staff a way for the youths to create a good start into the Swedish society.

The aim of this study is to understand and lighten the interviewees’ descriptions and their experiences of being unaccompanied youths in Sweden. In order to research this, we have analyzed the barriers, opportunities and the strategies they use to become a part of the society but also to strengthen their position in the society. The method we have used is the qualitative method and the data has been gathered by semi structured interviews with six unaccompanied youths. In order to analyze our results we have used symbolic interactionism and Antonovsky’s theory about sense of coherence. The results of the study have shown that most of the interviewees experienced having a difficult first period in Sweden considering the fact that they left their family and their home country to start a new life in Sweden, young and alone. With the use of different strategies, this became better over time as they developed their Swedish language skills, started to study, entered the labor market and expanded their social contact network. At the same time they have faced multiple opportunities to become a part of the society in different ways. They have also faced several barriers which has prevented them of becoming a part of the society and also weakened their position in the society. Therefore they have developed and used different strategies to get through these barriers. The main conclusion is that there are more positive aspects and possibilities than barriers for the unaccompanied youths to feel that they are a part of the society.