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The present article investigates how people manage understanding of personal experiences in an institutional setting in which shared understanding of one party's experience can become an issue at stake: social welfare interviews with child victims of abuse. New recommendations on how to respond to child interviewees limit interviewers' support to experiences of which they have direct access. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology to examine cases in which interviewers respond to children's reports of experiences by claiming to understand, the current article shows that interviewers primarily use such claims after interviewees have indicated that the interviewer may not understand. By claiming to understand, interviewers orient to a difference between an interview requirementnot assuming they know the children's specific experiencesand their ability to interpret the children's situations. The study shows how interviewers use claims of understanding to distinguish themselves as understanding persons from their information-eliciting approach as social welfare investigators. Findings contribute to social psychological research on how people manage challenges related to eliciting and recognizing experience in interaction. In particular, the study offers research on interviews with child victims of abuse a new angle on the tension between information elicitation and support.

Different areas of child welfare work call for psychometric measurement to replace professionals’ judgements with objective numbers. Using data from a national Swedish evaluation of interventions for abused children, the present article investigates child interviewees’ resistance to constraints in psychometric questions. The article contributes to studies of how psychology operates in institutional settings; it looks into the discursive production of the interviewee’s position in the struggle between the principle of recordability and ‘sensitive’ interviewing. The findings suggest that interviewees resist questions’ structural restrictions in the service of telling the interviewer about their lives. Thus, the function of their misalignment is affiliative; it cooperates both with the institutional goal of eliciting information and with the interviewer’s interest in them. However, the interviewer’s solutions to children’s problem presentations remain focused on generating recordable answers. The article concludes that the narrow focus on recordability neglects important opportunities to talk about children’s experiences.

Social psychologists interested in social interaction have, in recent years, addressed the ways that people negotiate 'who is entitled to know what' across a variety of conversational settings. Using recordings of interviews conducted as a part of a Swedish national evaluation of interventions for abused children, the current article examines how children navigate knowledge and its moral implications. The analysis focuses on a particular question ('What do you believe [the perpetrator] thinks about what he has done'), which draws on the psychological concept of mentalization: the cognitive ability to picture others' mental states based on their behaviour. The findings suggest that the concept of mentalization fails to account for the moral properties of knowing someone's thoughts: The perpetrator, most often the child's father, must be believable - recognized as both credible and knowable - for the children to claim access to his thoughts. The interviewees used contrastive constructions in claims of (no) access to their fathers' thoughts as they simultaneously contested idiomatic knowledge that undermined their claims. The article contributes to recent developments in discursive social psychology concerning how subjectivity, in particular, epistemic stance, is managed in institutional interaction, and continues the discursive psychological project of respecifying concepts such as mentalization.