Conversational Democracy: A Microsociological Look at Children’s Initiatives in Child and Family Social Work Dialogues

Children who experience violence, adversity, or other forms of injustice often suffer in silence, hidden behind closed doors or silenced by fear and shame. To activate meaningful support systems, these experiences bust be brought to light and made visible to those in a position to help.

When children interact with professionals who could provide support, their voices frequently encounter institutional barriers. Despite good intentions, professionals often work within the constraints of tight schedules and predetermined agendas. While such structures serve important purposes, they do not always align with what matters most to children.

Even seemingly open invitations—such as “What would you like to talk about today?” or “Have we discussed what matters most to you?”—can place unintended and unhelpful pressure on children. The first question puts the burden of initiating a conversational topic on the child, and both assume that the child can readily identify and articulate their priorities. The children may not yet have the words or sense of safety needed to express what is important to them in the moment. As a result, such well-meaning questions may not function as intended.

This is not to say that such questions and the ensuing responses lack value. But unless professionals also use their communication skills to facilitate children’s more unprompted talk, there is a risk that what truly matters to the child will not be articulated—potentially weakening both the quality of the work and the child’s right to express themselves freely in matters affecting them (UNCRC 1989). This raises a central question: Which conversational contributions facilitate children’s unprompted talk, allowing them to express their views freely?

I explore this question in depth in an article published in Child & Family Social Work (Edman 2025). There, I argue that practitioners should design their interactions according to what I term ‘conversational democracy’—a practice framework that creates conditions conducive to children’s initiatives in dialogues.

To answer the research question, I analyzed extant audiovisual recordings conducted as part of regular service delivery in social service departments and mental health clinics. In keeping with Microanalysis of face-to-face dialogues (e.g., Bavelas et al. 2016), I located all instances where children took initiatives and added topical content without having been explicitly prompted to (cf. Gerwing and Healing, 2017; Edman et al. 2022). I then examined the sequences in which those instances appeared. The analysis indicated that five types of conversational contributions facilitate children’s unprompted talk (see Figure 1; Edman 2025:5).

Figure 1. Five conversational contributions that facilitate children’s unprompted talk, allowing them to express their views freely. As illustrated by the cogwheels, the conversational contributions worked in unison.

The study is part of a small but growing body of practice-near research that examine actual practice. Unlike many previous studies, it attends to extant recordings inductively—without filtering them through transcription, field notes, or explanatory theories. This preserves the detailed dynamics of practice and improves the transferability between research and practice (Gerwing et al. 2023).

References

Bavelas, J. B., Gerwing, J., Healing, S., & Tomori, C. (2016). ‘Microanalysis of face-to-

face dialogue. An inductive approach, in C.A. VanLear and D.J. Canary (eds.), Researching Communication Interaction Behavior: A Sourcebook of Methods and Measures (pp. 129–157). Sage.

Edman, K. (2005) Conversational Democracy: Facilitating Children’s ‘Unprompted

Talk’ in Social Work Dialogues. Child & Family Social Work, 1–12.

Edman, K., A. W. Gustafsson, & C. B. Cuadra. (2022). Recognising Children’s

Involvement in Child and Family Therapy Sessions: A Microanalysis of Audiovisual Recordings of Actual Practice. British Journal of Social Work , 52(6),  3480–3500.

Gerwing, J., and S. Healing. 2017.  Manual for Calibrating Corpus Analysis: A Method for

Testing Whether There Are Two or Three Steps in Calibrating Sequences. International Microanalysis Associates.

Gerwing, J., Healing, S., & Menichetti, J. (2023). Microanalysis of clinical interactions, in

S. Bigi and M. G. Rossi (eds.), A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare: Fostering Inclusion and Active Participation Through Shared Understanding (pp. 43–74). John Benjamins.

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Treaty no. 27531. United

Nations Treaty Series, 1577, 3–178.