The aim of this study was to examine how adult children of parents with substance abuse describe their agency during childhood. The study was conducted by examining podcasts on substance abuse using qualitative content analysis. Eight different podcast episodes were included in which adult children describe their experiences of growing up in a family environment with alcohol and/or drugs. The focus of the analysis was how the adult children position themselves in their story in terms of agency and constraint. The main findings of the study was that the adult children described a range of experiences but with a focus on their vulnerability. The adult children described how they were subjected to uncertainty, neglect and sometimes violence throughout their childhood. At the same time they also positioned themselves as competent agents in their recounts. In their narratives they described how they used different strategies to control their situation and complex process of disclosure. The strategies were also described as meaningful and used for a specific purpose even though they were sometimes understood as problematic later on. However the adult children also positioned themselves as powerless in their narratives as they often experienced that their agency was constrained by their subordinated position as a child. An important recurrent experience was that despite their attempts to tell of their situation, it rarely led to a change. The adult children described several barriers to disclosure and how they often felt that nobody listened to them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-40892 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Lundmark, Jenny |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Malmö högskola, Institutionen för socialt arbete (SA) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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