| We illustrate preliminary findings of an ethnography on three Italian foster care communities. Even if traditionally studied by means of clinical methodologies, in our approach they are considered as both organizational, interactional and socio-cultural contexts. Cultural and Discursive Psychology (Molder & Potter, 2005) constitute our theoretical framework, concerning group homes as ‘thinking spaces’ (Zittoun, 2006) for children. Through conversational analysis (Sacks et al., 1974) of video-recorded dinnertime interactions, we want to show how participants (adults and kids) try to ‘do family’ through discursive and multimodal interactions. Data coming from nine dinnertimes – elected the most representative moments of everyday home-interaction (Ochs & Shoet, 2006; Pontecorvo et al., 2001) - show us many patterns of familial interaction (restrictive, enlarged and negotiated) depending on each group home. We will focus our analysis on three episodes, in which participants are able to build and maintain a sense of ‘talking as a family’ through sharing specific lexical terms. The three communities show different ways to achieve it, due to their situated interactional way of doing family. |
