Young people in foster care and their leisure : tools for living independently

![CDATA[The foster care environment, as a sub-set of Out-of-Home Care (OOHC), has been described as complex, regulated and one in which those in care have at times little or no control over important aspects of their lives. Indeed, it has been reported that young people in foster care are sometimes told by those in authority such as teachers that they need not concern themselves with ambition or aspiration because their life choices are already limited by their situation and their environment. Nevertheless, there are two sides to foster care and the second side involves supportive birth families, foster families, teachers, counsellors, case workers and friendships. As well, there is an inherent optimism among those in care reported by some authors. The research sourced data from twelve participants, aged between nine and sixteen years, living in foster care in NSW. Each participant represented a case study bounded (Miles & Huberman, 1994) by their individual leisure environment. The unit of analysis (Yin, 2018) for each case is the leisure experience of the participant. Data was gathered via a single semi-structured interview with each participant. The Ladder of Analytical Abstraction was used to analyse individual case study. Leisure was found to be a frequently used vehicle for the expression of this optimism, particularly with regard to the future.]]