Shared reporting, facework and participation in multiparty meetings

Client participation and collaborative practices between clients and professionals are fundamental premises of current social work policies and practices; however, many interactional factors challenge client participation. One attempt to overcome these challenges, such as asymmetrical relations, is that the client’s dedicated professional primary worker (PPW) attends meetings with them and supports client participation by collaboratively describing, explaining and assessing the client’s narrative with them and to other professionals. In this article, we conceptualise this process as shared reporting and argue that the practice is inherently face-threatening, as it questions the client’s epistemic right to express their own knowledge and experiences. Shared reporting also violates the right to positive self-presentation by creating opportunities for negative representations of the client’s self. The aim of this study is to analyse multiparty meetings through the lens of facework as conceptualised by Erving Goffman and his followers. Specifically, we explore how facework is accomplished in shared reporting sequences and how it influences participant participation in multiparty meeting sequence interactions. As part of a microanalytical interaction study, six audiorecorded multiparty meetings were assessed, and the results were arranged on a continuum from (1) face-threatening to (2) mixed to (3) face-saving interaction. PPW has a major impact on defining the client’s interactional self and participation in meetings. Thus, the value of shared reporting depends on the success of the facework conducted in each interactional sequence.