The reality of returning to work and training: experiences from a long-term unemployment project

A project called Pathway-to-Work was carried out in northern Finland between 1995 and 1998. In the course of this project, tailored return-to-work paths were planned for 140 long-term unemployed people with disabilities. The present study, based on that project, had three research objectives: (i) to describe how the participants experienced and defined their opportunities of employment and training at the beginning of the project and how the opportunities were eventually realized; (ii) to form a model of the issues that influenced the participants' decision making on the basis of their descriptions of their life situation; and (iii) to look for elements in the progression of the project that could explain the outcome in terms of the participants' situation in the labour market. The research design was composed of three parts: eight in-depth interviews, a register follow-up, and comparison with a matched control group. Comparative content analysis was used to process the in-depth interviews. The outcome was evaluated according to the following variables: (i) the changes in the participants' labour market situation during the 2-year follow-up; (ii) the changes in the participants' distress level, perceived competence, and sense of coherence during the intervention. We found that the participants had not decided whether to return to work but had left this decision to the professional working on the project. The way participants described their life situations and opportunities made it clear that they placed high expectations on the project. However, although they could realistically estimate their own potential, the labour-market situation was beyond their predictive vision. We conclude that, when targeting services to groups such as described here, more attention should be paid to understanding the clients' behaviour and the social circumstances in which they live.