“Shared care” through instant messaging updates in youth care; an interaction analysis

In this article, we analyse WhatsApp interactions in a youth care setting. In family-style group care, young people temporarily live in the family of professional foster parents (PFP), while they regularly visit their birth parents (BPs). Our data consist of instant messaging of 11 pairs of PFPs and BPs during 2 months. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), we focused on the social interaction between BPs and PFPs, achieved in and through multi-modally constructed sequences of updates—responses. First, updates are used by BPs in the context of the transfer from the child from/to the PFP marking the transfer of responsibility for the child. Second, PFPs use images as updates to provide BPs quasi-primary access to the experiences of the child. Third, updates are given or elicited in the context of prior problems. Across these functions, we observe that while BPs work to display responsibility, PFPs subtly empower BPs as parents.