Child Health Records as Socio-Material Instruments of Distributing Responsibility. A Comparative Analysis of Paediatric Documents from Austria, England and Germany

Internationally child health records are central instruments of paediatric early detection and prevention of developmental disorders. Regarding children’s developmental processes, child health records act as agents of developmental norms, moderate the distribution of tasks between parents and paediatricians and thus materially mediate practices of generational ordering. Drawing on actor-network-theoretical and ethnomethodological approaches to documents as active texts, the comparative analysis of child health records from three European countries focuses on similarities and differences in the conceptions of parental and paediatric responsibilities that can be reconstructed from the documents’ form. Referencing
normalism theory, the authors work out analytically how health programmes are materialised in
documents/instruments, how specific conceptions of the child in development differ and how the construction of parental and paediatric tasks varies in these instruments. In concluding, the analysis is contextualised in different health policies in childhood.