Kontroversen om DAMP. En kontroversstudie av vetenskapligt gränsarbete och översättning mellan olika kunskapsparadigm

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how medical professionals during the controversy of the neuropsychiatric diagnosis DAMP, express their interpretation and jurisdiction claims for knowledge and power in Swedish comprehensive school’s pedagogical practice and theory concerning pupil’s learning disabilities and behavior problems.

The controversy study is focused to answer three specific questions: How are medical professionals expressing their interpretation and jurisdiction claims for knowledge in the controversy? How are medical professionals using the comprehensive school as an arena in the struggle for the right to formulate a medical paradigm and to mai ntain the power of jurisdiction? How are medical professionals defining knowledge of pedagogic theory in relation to the paradigm of knowledge that describes neuropsychiatric diagnoses?

The study describes, analyze and discuss the specific images of the Swedish comprehensive school that emerge through the examined medical perspectives from the two Swedish medical journals, Läkartidningen and Dagens Medicin, during the different steps of the controversy. The first stage of the analysis is carried out by the use of an analytic protocol, constructed by Markle & Petersen (1981) with the specific purpose to examine the development and the dynamics characterizing various interest groups involved in a controversy. The second stage of the study focuses on the cognitive and social structures of the participants’ contributions and examines how arguments form category systems, reflecting different ontological and epist emological representations related to the perspectives on individuals, on school and on society.

It is concluded that, compared to the discourse of the medical nomenclature, teachers and other representatives of the school scene’s possibilities to formulate a pedagogical problem in a professional language are quite restricted. Inversely, psychiatrists and other representatives of the medical scene claim the right to formulate a medical explanation including the necessary pedagogical solutions to transform the diagnosis into pedagogical practices. Finally the results indicate a practice of special needs education programs in the comprehensive school effected by and oriented towards the neuropsychiatric paradigm.