Assessing candidates for adoptive parenthood. Institutional re-formulations of biographical notes

Prospective adoptive parents who take part in a Dutch adoption assessment procedure are asked to write down their life stories. In this article we examine how information from the life stories is deleted, selected and transformed into a topic to talk about in an assessment interview and/or to write about in a recommendation record. We have shown in a detailed analysis how prospective adoptive parents demonstrate themselves to be “normal people” with “normal childhoods” and how life events are selected from the life stories as a means to assess the coping qualities of the prospective adoptive parents. We could conclude that social workers in the recommendation record: 1) turn statements made by the parents into facts; 2) leave statements in the parents' own words, and that they 3) assess suspicions of possible risk factors in the interview but omit them from the record. By using conversation analysis as a method we could gain an insight into the dynamics of assessment, making visible exactly how social workers collect information about people's background to arrive at a decision about whether the candidates are suitable adoptive parents.