Constructing the case: How residential care professionals construct their everyday definitions and practices with unaccompanied minors

The aim of this paper is to analyze how residential care professionals working in residential care facilities for children discursively craft the term “unaccompanied minors” (UMs) and how, in doing so, they account for and justify their everyday practices. Drawing on a pattern of ethnographic interviews with educators and managers of Italian residential care homes for children, the study exploits a discursive psychology-oriented approach (Edwards & Potter, 1992). The findings show that differences occurred over the construction of the term “UMs” and illustrate how these definitions impact over the everyday (declared) institutional practices. Professionals’ discursive case-construction appear to be highly different from “standard” out-of-home children: from their (psychological) age, cultural background, to their everyday needs. Our findings reflect numerous (existential) paradoxes of hosting UMs in residential care (Ferradji, 2012). In the conclusions we explore the connections between case-construction and everyday practices and we provide practical implications for future research and residential care implementation.