Assessment in Action : Assessing and Displaying Suitability for Adoptive Parenthood through Text and Talk

Abstract

'Assessment in action' is an ethnographical conversation analysis of how suitability for adoptive parenthood is assessed in institutional interaction. It is about talking with clients and transforming this talk into documents. Conversations and texts are submitted to a sentence by sentence analysis that takes both the local and the institutional context into account; and that questions how the assessment practice can be understood in the context of child protection where social workers have dual professional identities: that of helper and that of gatekeeper. The main objective of the analysis is to explore how social workers carry out their institutional task of assessing suitability for adoptive parenthood through text and talk in the context of the Child Protection Board in the Netherlands.