Sociétés et Jeunesses en Difficulté (Jan 2020)
La colère chez les éducateurs de la PJJ : une émotion inutile mais légitime face à la transgression d’un jeune
Abstract
Educational work with teenagers that are likely to enter into conflict may be a source of frustration and anger. The youth workers’ interpretation of the meaning of opposition behaviors is possibly linked to their emotional reactions.The purpose of this study is to explore the juvenile justice educators’ attitudes towards anger. By presenting to juvenile justice trainee educators (N= 85) a fictive scenario that recounts a conflict situation in which an educator feels angry, this study is interested in the evaluation of usefulness and legitimacy of the youth worker’s anger as well as the way to interpret the teenager’s behavior (controllable causal attributions vs uncontrollable and internal vs external ones).The results show that a large majority of the youth workers judge that anger is useless and a small majority of them estimate that anger is, however, legitimate. Moreover, youth workers are more likely to perceive the adolescent’s behavior as internal but uncontrollable, what provides an indulgent explanation to the transgression that seems to be able to be linked to the attitude towards anger.In light of these results and in the context of the emotional work to be done by juvenile justice educators, those indulgent causal attributions can be interpreted as cognitive strategies of anger regulation. Finally, the legitimacy given to anger could translate a claim of emotional autonomy by youth workers or an attitude favorable to anger despite the knowledge of its uselessness.
