JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The Dutch childcare benefits scandal (toeslagenschandaal) involved the wrongful labeling of thousands of parents as fraudsters in the childcare allowance system. This led to long-term harm for families and a profound trust crisis in governmental institutions. While the national recovery operation provided financial compensation, municipalities were tasked with offering broader support across life domains to youth that grew up in affected families. Central to this effort was helping them "come to terms" with the scandal by acknowledging, processing, and moving forward from its practical and emotional consequences. Yet many youth remain hard to reach due to distrust and avoidance of institutional contact.

Objective:

This paper describes the development and pretest of a Theory of Change (ToC), grounded in Entertainment-Education (EE) principles, designed to address the municipality of Rotterdam’s challenge of reaching and supporting youth affected by the scandal.

Methods:

We employed a two-stage formative approach. First, semi-structured interviews with 10 affected youth informed the ToC, segmenting youth by their readiness to come to terms with the benefits scandal, ranging from avoidance to active peer support, and aligning messages to each stage. Second, affected youth and a professional producer artist co-created a rap track and music video (“Excuses/Tegenwind" [Apologies/Headwind]) to tell their story and provide inspiration. The video was pretested at the Flow Your Mind peer-network event, where we evaluated how well it advanced the ToC's goals through focus groups and interviews.

Results:

The interviews revealed that affected youth experienced the benefits scandal as a disruptive family event, marked by chronic stress, shame, and distrust in governmental institutions. Many described coping through avoidance, ignoring official communication, withdrawing emotionally, and/or relying on self-sufficiency. The ToC prioritized recognition of lived experiences, inspiration through peer narratives, and gradual connection to support. The pretest showed that the co-created music video aligned with EE's core mechanisms: youth described the music video as confronting yet validating, noting that it reduced shame and sharing their experiences in their own language. Participants stressed the need for peer-to-peer, low-threshold pathways (e.g., WhatsApp groups) to sustain engagement.

Conclusions:

When governmental institutions face trust issues, formative research is critical to designing effective communication strategies. In this paper, formative research informed a ToC grounded in EE principles, leading to the co-creation of a music video that served as a stepping stone to municipal support by fostering recognition, inspiration, and peer connection. This approach demonstrates how formative research can contribute to interventions that gradually (re)connect with hard-to-reach groups, offering a transferable example for low-trust contexts.