Accomplishing child protection assessments: the interactional production of moral objects in projecting institutional futures
Our presentation describes the sequential and categorical methods which accomplish-in-use the ‘work objects’ of child protection assessments. In doing so, we recover the situated methods of assessment in child protection and, specifically, the accomplishment of ‘moral objects’ in relation to local interactional possibilities and institutional futures. Moral objects describe one set of methods that social workers use to bring about trajectories of “parental transformation” over the course of a case. Moral objects gloss the social workers’ introduction of categorial items, at particular moments in the assessment, to be negotiated by the service user; that is, for them to deny, accept, or display remorse. Significantly, we suggest that these moral objects, whilst locally accomplished and negotiated, are embedded within an extended institutional temporality, glossed as ‘the case’, and thus serve as ‘objectivated’ work items for charting parental transformation. Our research draws on fieldnote data and recordings from a larger ethnographic study of child protection practice that describes a series of practices central to ‘fixing change’ in social work, tied to the project of the objectivation of selves and, significantly, as organised in and through the membership category device ‘family’. The project draws on Lieberman’s (2018) work on objectivation practices, extending it to professional work where accounts of human change and identity are the primary work object. The data set includes observations of social work with six families over the course of a year and demonstrates how ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography can provide for the observation and description of how social workers, in and through situated methods, accomplish accountable change, or lack thereof, over time. We draw on membership categorisation analysis to describe social workers’ use of moral objects to accomplish professional assessments. Our key finding is that social workers have orderly methods for co-producing knowledge in assessment, namely via placing different forms of moral object ‘on the table’, to see what work parents do with them. We show how a failure to ‘pick up’ moral objects from the categorical table, presents an accountable matter for the social worker, indicating how forms of acknowledgement, or lack thereof, of these items as moral objects has interactional and institutional consequences. We also show how moral objects are used to account for in situ assessments and decisions, however small, relating to a clients categorial status, character, capacity for engagement and change, and projected institutionalised futures. In closing, we note how rather than instrumentally utilising taught communication ‘skills’, social workers methods of charting parental change are accomplished through situationally specific situated category practices, with interactional and institutional consequences.
Cardiff University