Franzen2018

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Franzen2018
BibType ARTICLE
Key Franzen2018
Author(s) Anna Franzén, Karin Aronsson
Title ‘Then she got a spanking’: Social accountability and narrative versions in social workers’ courtroom testimonies
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Discursive Psychology, accounts, accounting, formulation, categorizations, child custody disputes, courtroom talk, event descriptions, narrative versions, person descriptions, problem formulation, accountability
Publisher
Year 2018
Language English
City
Month
Journal Discourse Studies
Volume 20
Number 5
Pages 577–597
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/1461445618760605
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Courtroom talk in child custody interrogations recurrently features contrasting event descriptions about ‘what happened’, as well as contrasting person descriptions. This case study – from a large set of audio-recorded courtroom examinations – documents how social workers’ contrasting narrative versions about alleged domestic violence are related to divergent problem formulations. Blame-account sequences feature descriptions of a particular event as violent or nonviolent and descriptions of a new partner as ‘non-adult’ or merely as ‘impulsive’ but ‘concerned’. Other contrasting person descriptions feature a target child either as ‘normal’ or as someone who ‘has a diagnosis’. This involves categorizations of the particular child either as a victim (‘normal child’) or as someone ‘with a diagnosis’, two contrasting accounts that provide divergent explanatory formulations of what the overall problem is. Ultimately, divergent testimonies also reflect how social accounts in court reflect both mitigated/aggravated descriptions of violence and divergent accounts of parents’ and children’s agency and accountability.

Notes