Constructing Hope: Narrative and the Foster Care Experience

Abstract

This dissertation, Constructing Hope: Narrative and the Foster Care Experience, analyzes the language used to explain the foster care experience to children under the care of Arizona's Child Protective Services (CPS). The dissertation proposes revisions to the language around foster care to make the experience less confusing and makes recommendations to encourage hope for foster children. This multi-methodological study combines ethnography and textography. Engaging narrative inquiry, relying particularly on Earnest Bormann and Walter Fisher, the dissertation analyzes Arizona's training material for Child Protective Services (CPS) case managers (CORE training) and Arizona's training material for foster parents (PS-MAPP training) along with interviews of case managers and foster parents. The analysis of the CORE training for CPS case managers reveals that narratives about CPS generally focus on the birth parent as central to the plot and situate children as supporting characters. Also, the analysis shows narrative disjunctures between the characterization of birth parents in the CORE training and the experiences of the case managers interviewed. I show how the language used in the CORE training could be more coherent with the experiences of case managers and the experiences of children. The analysis of the PS-MAPP training reveals a contradiction between the characterization of the foster caregiver and the metaphor of "parent" used to describe the foster caregiver. Also, the study demonstrates ways in which the strength/needs framework, which is central to the training, could be expanded to better prepare foster caregivers for their work. Finally, examining Aviva Children's Services' Life Book program reveals ways in which hope can be cultivated for foster children. The analysis of the Life Book project proposes a rhetoric of hope applicable to other populations who have undergone serious trauma.