Abstract
The paper reports on findings from an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with Norwegian parents identified as part of a high-conflict divorce situation and interviews with caseworkers from a child welfare service. The site of study is an institutional circuit of concern, assessment, and referral involving the court, child welfare services, and a public family therapy service. The paper draws on the social ontology and analytic concepts of institutional ethnography and adopts parents’ standpoint to explore how their knowledge and experience are shaped through encounters with professionals in the process of being identified and assessed as a high-conflict divorce case. The focus on people’s doings and their expert knowledge about their doings sets institutional ethnographic research apart from more conventional forms of qualitative inquiry that focus on informants’ inner experience. The paper highlights how a generalized professional discourse seems to permeate the work that parents and caseworkers jointly engage in, sometimes subsuming the knowledge and experience of those involved. When the issues of life as subjectively known and experienced are different from those of the institutional discourse, there is a danger that what is important to those whose lives they concern escapes the dialogue between parents and professionals.
Highlights
Father: “One of my goals, since the second court.... second child welfare... first child welfare case, and first... second court proceeding... first court proceeding, has been for my daughter not to be institutionalized, repeatedly having to expose herself and her family in treatment, in assessment interviews, and all that, the whole bloody time
Using the concepts and mode of inquiry of institutional ethnography, I have sought to explore a small segment of the social organization of high-conflict divorce as it came into view when seen from the standpoint of Norwegian parents engaging with services catering to post-divorce concerns
The purpose of the institutional procedures studied was to help identify families struggling with high-conflict divorce and establish a reasonable and professionally sound offer of family therapy services
Summary
Father: “One of my goals, since the second court.... second child welfare... first child welfare case, and first... second court proceeding... first court proceeding, has been for my daughter not to be institutionalized, repeatedly having to expose herself and her family in treatment, in assessment interviews, and all that, the whole bloody time. South Norway Hospital, Arendal, Norway 3 Department of Psychosocial Health, Faculty of Health and Sports Sciences, University of Agder, Grimstad, Norway This piece of dialogue comes from a research interview with a father, conducted a few days before he was to start participating in a multi-family group therapy program for parents and children living with high levels of conflict between parents after divorce. It shows a disjuncture between his local, parental desire to provide his daughter with a ‘normal’ childhood and how he had come to publicly enact his fatherhood by engaging with professionals in court proceedings, child welfare assessments, and other institutional services.
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