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.

该论文报告了一项实证研究的结果，该研究基于对被定为高冲突离婚情况一部分的挪威父母的定性访谈以及对儿童福利机构个案工作者的访谈。研究地点是涉及法院，儿童福利服务和公共家庭治疗服务的机构关注，评估和转介的机构。本文借鉴了制度民族志的社会本体论和分析概念，并采用父母的立场来探讨在被认定为高冲突离婚案的过程中，通过与专业人士的相遇，他们的知识和经验是如何形成的。对人的行为及其行为的专业知识的关注使制度的人种学研究与传统的定性探究形式不同，后者主要关注线人的内部经验。该论文强调了一种普遍的专业话语如何渗透到父母和个案工作者共同从事的工作中，有时甚至吸收了所涉人员的知识和经验。当主观上已知和经历过的生活问题不同于制度性论述时，存在着一种危险，即对于他们所关注的生命而言，重要的事情会逃避父母与专业人员之间的对话。有时会包含相关人员的知识和经验。当主观上已知和经历过的生活问题不同于制度性论述时，存在着一种危险，即对于他们所关注的生命而言，重要的事情会逃避父母与专业人员之间的对话。有时会包含相关人员的知识和经验。当主观上已知和经历过的生活问题不同于制度性论述时，存在着一种危险，即对于他们所关注的生命而言，重要的事情会逃避父母与专业人员之间的对话。