Using Institutional Ethnography to improve policy. An example from STRESS-Mums Project

STRESS-Mums project is a two-year Institutional Ethnography (Smith, 2005, 2006) in four European countries on the legal transition (separation/divorce) from double to single parenthood. The research study investigates how judicial institutions and legal professionals shape this phase of transition. The fieldwork involves lone mothers, legal professionals (attorneys), gender activists, and other professionals. Through discursive interviews and interviews to the double, the study investigates how mothers and professionals “read” and interpret the legal texts translating them in a language that fits the everyday experience of the lone mothers.

Institutional Ethnography (IE) is a feminist research approach. IE allows investigating how texts’ interpretations, the translations of these texts done by people to other people, and institutional discourses (Manicom and Campbell 1995) socially organize the knowledge. In other words, IE allows understanding how texts shape the everyday life of people.

The methodological approach focuses on three aspects: the text, the process, the discourse (Murray 2020). In STRESS-Mums, the texts are the law on children custody and other laws and codes that organize the civil trial; the process concerns the active translation of the law by professionals (“specialized readers”) and by the mothers (“non-specialized readers”); the discourse is the textually mediated discourse that circulates among institutions, professionals, and mothers. The disjunctures between texts, process, and discourse and the concrete needs of the mothers are highlighted.

This poster illustrates how IE collects data and identifies disjunctures, and how the research project works in explaining these disjunctures to participants, policymakers, and stakeholders to improve policies and practices. Using the STRESS-Mums project as an example, the poster shows how the IE approach can be applied to other areas of research that need to detect gaps between the people’s everyday experience and institutions’ ruling functions by texts (e.g., law, regulations, and guidelines).

This poster was presented at the 2021 Marie Curie Alumni Association Conference.