Whose Life is it Anyway? Exploring the Social Relations of High-Conflict Divorce Cases in Southern Norway

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.