Constituting agency in the delivery of telephone-mediated victim support
Name:
AWQRIP22Novrevisedsubmitted.pdf
Size:
356.9Kb
Format:
PDF
Description:
author's accepted version
Authors
Weatherall, AnnAffiliation
Victoria University of WellingtonIssue Date
2020-02-17
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
In telephone helpline interactions, a practical problem for participants is how to advance a relevant course of action about what can be done within the institution’s remit that may not be what a caller asks for or needs. This study investigates how call-takers progress delivering support for callers ringing a service for victims of crime and trauma. It focuses on how actions are advanced by the call-taker using linguistic formats that can be broadly characterised as directive-commissive speech acts. The research asks how agency is constituted through the linguistic format parties’ use to display what can be done and who decides. Using conversation analysis to examine 80 cases where the delivery of support is progressed, the results show that subtle morpho-syntactic variation in the format of interrogatives (i.e., ‘Did you want to,’ ‘Do you want to’) display orientations to who can do or decide upon a future course of action. Evidence is presented that the ‘did you form’ tilts the agency toward the Self as something she can progress whereas the ‘do you’ format tilts the balance toward the Other to decide. More obviously, the actions can be formulated in terms of the Self committing to an action (e.g., ‘I’ll pop you through’) or as clearly deferring to the Other to decide (e.g., ‘would you like me to’). This study furthers the general intellectual project of discursive psychology by providing an empirical demonstration of the way classic questions about the nature of subjectivity and individual agency can be re-specified as shared practices for accomplishing action in social interaction.Citation
Weatherall A (2020) 'Constituting agency in the delivery of telephone-mediated victim support', Qualitative Research in Psychology, 17 (3), pp.396-412.Publisher
RoutledgeAdditional Links
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14780887.2020.1725951Type
ArticleLanguage
enISSN
1478-0887ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1080/14780887.2020.1725951
Scopus Count
Collections
The following license files are associated with this item:
- Creative Commons
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Green - can archive pre-print and post-print or publisher's version/PDF