Engaging Parents with Parenting Programmes: Relationship Building in Initial Conversations

Abstract

This article examines how practitioners engage with parents who have been referred to parenting programmes. Engaging parents is an important component of child welfare work so that parents can benefit from interventions and outcomes for children can be improved. However, our knowledge of engagement is still developing and research in the field is frequently based on self-reported data. This study used Conversation Analysis to examine direct recordings of initial telephone conversations between parenting practitioners and parents following their referral to the service. Results revealed that in the majority of calls, practitioners focused on the primary task of making arrangements for the service, but in a minority of calls, practitioners departed from the usual progress of the call to ask parents about the difficulties they were facing. When they did so, practitioners committed themselves to substantial additional work listening to the parent and extending the length of the call. However, they also pursued different actions to engage the parent with the service that were built up incrementally in the talk. By examining three particular features of practitioners' talk during these sequences, the article considers how a practice phenomenon such as engagement may be purposefully worked up moment by moment.

Making fathers relevant: How practitioners include both parents in talk about parenting programmes

“…For further details of the ethical considerations, see Symonds (2018). From these services, six practitioners made audio recordings of their initial telephone conversations with parents who had been referred to the service.…”

“…At the end of the call, the practitioner asked the parent for consent again to see if the parent was still willing for the recording to be used. For further details of the ethical considerations, see Symonds (). The study received ethical approval from the University of Bristol Research Ethics Committee.…”

“…Extract 2 is a typical example. FIGURE 1 Phases of initial calls to parents referred to a parenting programme (Symonds, 2015) 03 Par: bu' .hh it was always elsewhere, bu[t ne]ver Parents only described their difficulties when they had been invited to do (Symonds, 2018), but when they were, parents faced the task of presenting their difficulties as serious enough to warrant support but also of presenting themselves as a responsible parent who was managing as well as could reasonably be expected. The parent in Extract 2 achieves this by positioning herself as more able than most to manage her son's difficulties (which were "always elsewhere").…”

The use of a client-feedback system in activation encounters

“…Research has also focused on how professionals and users accomplish, share, contest and resist institutional tasks, identities or categories. Research suggests that interactions where social workers take a 'non-expert' stance and actively work to listen to and understand users' experiences contribute to shared understandings (Lee, Herschman, and Johnstone 2019), building relationships with users (Symonds 2018) and increasing users' perceived abilities to perform skills associated with employability (Danneris and Dall 2017). Users may, however, align with the institutional identities offered to them by explaining or justifying accounts if they do not meet the professionals' expectations (Solberg 2011) or through diplomatic accounts that defend their moral identity as an 'appropriate' user (Flinkfeldt 2017;Solberg 2017).…”

“…Research suggest that although strict standardized formats with established rules for conversation (e.g., questionnaires) limit user participation, flexible formats with more room for user actions and narratives may be less transparent to users (Matarese and Caswell 2017). Moreover, professionals and users collaboratively develop strategies to manage standardized interaction, for example, by using face-work, meta-comments and taking 'off-track' interactions (Barfoed 2018;Symonds 2018).…”