Carly W. Butler

Advice-implicative interrogatives: building 'client-centered' support in a children's helpline

Interactional research on advice giving has described advice as normative and asymmetric. In this paper we examine how these dimensions of advice are softened by counselors on a helpline for children and young people through the use of questions. Through what we term “advice-implicative interrogatives,” counselors ask clients about the relevance or applicability of a possible future course of action. The allusion to this possible action by the counselor identifies it as normatively relevant, and displays the counselor’s epistemic authority in relation to dealing with a client’s problems. However, the interrogative format mitigates the normative and asymmetric dimensions typical of advice sequences by orienting to the client’s epistemic authority in relation to their own lives, and delivering advice in a way that is contingent upon the client’s accounts of their experiences, capacities, and understandings. The demonstration of the use of questions in advice sequences offers an interactional specification of the “client-centered” support that is characteristic of prevailing counseling practice. More specifically, it shows how the values of empowerment and child-centered practice, which underpin services such as Kids Helpline, are embodied in specific interactional devices. Detailed descriptions of this interactional practice offer fresh insights into the use of interrogatives in counseling contexts, and provide practitioners with new ways of thinking about, and discussing, their current practices.

Intervening With Conversation Analysis in Telephone Helpline Services: Strategies to Improve Effectiveness

This article overviews the way conversation analytic work on telephone helplines can make an impact in practical situations. It takes three illustrative themes in helpline research: (a) the giving, receiving, and resisting of advice; (b) the expression of strong emotion and its identification, management, and then coordination with helpline goals; and (c) how helplines’ policies and practices shape the interactions between caller and call taker. For each of these themes, we show how conversation analysis research insights have been applied to improve helpline effectiveness. This has been done through a variety of practice-based reports, consultancy exercises, and training initiatives, including workshops where we aim to identify and facilitate good practice. Intervention studies of this type are at the forefront of interactional research on telephone helplines. Data are in Australian and British English.

Exploring young children's web searching and technoliteracy

– This paper aims to report findings from an exploratory study investigating the web interactions and technoliteracy of children in the early childhood years. Previous research has studied aspects of older childrens technoliteracy and web searching; however, few studies have analyzed web search data from children younger than six years of age., – The study explored the Google web searching and technoliteracy of young children who are enrolled in a “preparatory classroom” or kindergarten (the year before young children begin compulsory schooling in Queensland, Australia). Young children were video‐ and audio‐taped while conducting Google web searches in the classroom. The data were qualitatively analysed to understand the young childrens web search behaviour., – The findings show that young children engage in complex web searches, including keyword searching and browsing, query formulation and reformulation, relevance judgments, successive searches, information multitasking and collaborative behaviours. The study results provide significant initial insights into young childrens web searching and technoliteracy., – The use of web search engines by young children is an important research area with implications for educators and web technologies developers., – This is the first study of young childrens interaction with a web search engine.

No, We're Not Playing Families: Membership Categorization in Children's Play

In this article, we use Sackss (1992) work on membership categorization in childrens play and games as an analytic basis for examining the organization of play sequences between 6- and 7-year-old children. We collected and examined around 33 hr of audio-recorded interactions between children in the school playground. We discuss how the children used membership categorization devices and their associated rules and applications to organize social action in a range of play activities. Membership in a game was achieved through the mapping of children to the category-sets of players. The consistency rule and the notion of programmatic relevance were central operative features in the organization of the childrens games. Mapping occurred recurrently in the childrens play, for example, on initiating a new play sequence or when incorporating a newplayer into an established activity. The sequential and categorical organization of play involves the situated use of cultural resources to produce nuanced and creative versions of the world. In this article, we contribute to understandings of childrens communicative competencies and the situated production of their cultural and social worlds in their talk in interaction.

A Rhetorical Approach to Discussions about Health and Vegetarianism

Typically, research on vegetarianism has sought to identify the psychological characteristics that distinguish vegetarians from meat-eaters. Health concerns have been identified as a motivation for meat abstention. In this article, rhetorical analysis of Internet discussions about health and vegetarianism highlights the argumentative orientation of explanations for meat consumption, with the various constructions of health serving a rhetorical function. We show the dilemmatic nature of arguments about the relationship between food and health: food can promote health and cause ill-health, and suggest that meat-eating as a dominant practice is supported by the rhetorical use of notions of ‘balance’, implying moderation, inclusion and rationality. This rhetorical approach represents a radical critique of past work that assumes opinions given in response to questions about vegetarian practices represent ‘causes’ of dietary practice.

Script proposals: A device for empowering clients in counselling

Much of the research on the delivery of advice by professionals such as physicians, health workers and counsellors, both on the telephone and in face-to-face interaction more generally, has focused on the theme of client resistance and the consequent need for professionals to adopt particular formats to assist in the uptake of the advice. In this article we consider one setting, Kid’s Helpline, the national Australian counselling service for children and young people, where there is an institutional mandate not to give explicit advice in accordance with the values of self-direction and empowerment. The article examines one practice, the use of script proposals by counsellors, which appears to offer a way of providing support which is consistent with these values. Script proposals entail the counsellors packaging their advice as something that the caller might say — at some future time — to a third party such as a friend, teacher, parent or partner, and involve the counsellor adopting the speaking position of the caller in what appears as a rehearsal of a forthcoming strip of interaction. Although the core feature of a script proposal is the counsellor’s use of direct reported speech, they appear to be delivered not so much as exact words to be followed, but as the type of conversation that the client needs to have with the third party. Script proposals, in short, provide models of what to say as well as alluding to how these could be emulated by the client. In their design, script proposals invariably incorporate one or more of the most common rhetorical formats for maximizing the persuasive force of an utterance such as a three-part list or a contrastive pair. Script proposals, moreover, stand in a complex relation to the prior talk and one of their functions appears to be to summarize, respecify or expand upon the client’s own ideas or suggestions for problem solving that have emerged in these preceding sequences.

Address Terms in Turn Beginnings: Managing Disalignment and Disaffiliation in Telephone Counseling

This article examines use of address terms by counselors on a telephone counseling service for children and young people. Drawing on conversation analytic findings and methods, we show how personal names are used in the management of structural and interpersonal aspects of counseling interaction. Focusing on address terms in turn beginnings—where a name is used as, or as part of, a preface—the analysis shows that address terms are used in turns that are not fitted with prior talk in terms of either the activity or affective stance of the client. We discuss two environments in which this practice is observed: in beginning turns that initiate a new action sequence and in turns that challenge the clients position. Our focus is on the use of client names in the context of producing disaligning or disaffiliative actions. In disaligned actions, counselors produced sequentially disjunctive turns that regularly involved a return to a counseling agenda. In disaffiliative actions, counselors presented a stance that did not fit with the affective stance of the client in the prior turn—for instance, in disagreeing with or complimenting the client. The article discusses how such turns invoke a counseling agenda and how name use is used in the management of rapport and trust in counseling interaction.

Walking Out on Air

This article explores walkouts from news interviews. The majority of these exhibit recurrent interactional features, which are described. Latent hostility becomes manifest at the very moment of the walkout. Just seconds before, there are few clues of the interviewees forthcoming departure. Walkouts can thus appear as “outbursts.” Cases where hostilities remain almost entirely latent are then considered, where interviewees establish noncomplaining accounts for their departure. Walkouts might seem the ultimate violation of a setting that demands that interviewees stay in place and respond to negative questioning with tact. But in their dispassionate and muted character, walkouts supply perhaps the strongest evidence of a setting that curtails the expression of personal anger and annoyance.

“My f***ing personality”: swearing as slips and gaffes in live television broadcasts

Abstract This paper examines instances of swearing in live television broadcasts. While some cable television shows routinely involve swearing without censorship and recorded shows may include swearing “bleeped out,” our interest is in instances of swearing in contexts where swearing is prohibited. We look at live interviews and panel debates where swearing is clearly noticed and reacted to strongly—and in all cases retracted or apologized for in some way. The examples we examine thus involve a participant visibly moving outside the normative limits of the interaction, and as such reveal the boundaries that serve as organizational structures for the interactions. Drawing on Goffmans work on gaffes and slips and ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the paper explores how swearing is treated by the participants as a practical concern, and how swearing and its management implicates the identities and relationships of the participants and the specific context of the interaction. We discuss how swearing in live broadcasts reveals the limits of authenticity within informal, conversational interviews and debates.

Recruitments, engagements, and partitions: managing participation in play

ABSTRACT This paper examines the social practices children use to manage participation in play activities. Part of a wider research project looking at childrens physical activity in play, this article considers the role of social interaction in shaping active play. The focus is on how children get others to take part in play they have initiated, and how inclusion and exclusion in play is managed. The data examined are video-recordings of seven- to eight-year-old childrens play with toys and boxes in groups of four. The analysis identifies three interactional strategies used to manage play participation: recruitments, engagements, and partitions. We discuss the design and use of these strategies within the play activity. The paper contributes to studies of childrens play interaction, and argues for the importance of understanding childrens social practices in studies of physical activity in play. Implications for interventions aimed at encouraging active play are discussed.