With whimsy: Are you really a Child and Youth Care Worker?

Karen vanderVen

Recently I saw on CYC-Net a question about a selection of child and youth workers, asking, “How we can do it?“ One way is to identify common attributes and interests of those who have been in the field a while.

Some years ago, recognizing commonalities among those I’d known and observed in the field, I came up with an easy questionnaire reflecting these observations. Several others added an item and it became a “rolling” questionnaire. At the time, I would distribute this one-pager at conferences and people would check things off. I actually collected quite a pile of responses. So the recent question about selection reminded me of this.

Both seriously – and whimsically (this is not exactly an instrument of the positivist, rational-empirical paradigm) – rather than rant from my Soapbox this month, I’ve decided to share this with you. Take it, enjoy, and see how you fare:

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Child and Youth Workers Questionnaire
You can print out this page, and if the attribute applies to you, please check it off as Yes or No

I like cats
I have wanted to run a restaurant
I like chocolate
My walls have many things on them
I have trouble sometimes with left-right discrimination
I was brought up in a small, close neighborhood
I like to make snow angels
I have a pet
I believe in higher order beings
I come from a large family
I carry things in bags
I like to fix things or take them apart
I have wanted to own a bookstore

Some of the previous results were most interesting. Amazing how many people agreed to having the difficulty with right-left discrimination. Not everyone liked cats, of course (some claimed more affinity with dogs) but still there seemed to be lots of feline friends among us.