Beyond Open-Ended: Tools to Explore Questions and Power during Decision-Making with Families

Questions are an essential aspect of decision-making by families and early educators in a range of contexts, and are particularly important during the informal assessment and collaborative planning that characterize home visits. Yet recommendations for questions tend to focus on form alone, such as encouragement to ask open- rather than closed-ended questions. These recommendations have limited practical application because they frame language as decontextualized and power-free, which can contribute to marginalizing families. Instead, when early educators conceptualize questions as part of discourse—rooted in context and imbued with power—they can better understand nuances of questions and ultimately enact shared decision-making with families. This conceptual paper illustrates the potential of discourse theory as a framework to explore questions and their consequences for decision-making power. Linguistic features of questions are presented along with discursive tools adapted from Gee (2014) that researchers and early educators can use to examine how questions contribute to sharing power or maintaining professional control of decisions. Transcripts from previously conducted, ethically approved investigations using discourse analysis exemplify how the tools can be used to examine how questions function in real conversations between families of infants and toddlers and home visitors. The selected transcripts represent four different home visiting programs in the United States and depict how questions played in role in decision-making about how to support children’s development.