Charles Antaki

Analysing Everyday Explanation: A Casebook of Methods.

Explanations are given and received in all areas of social life: in the home, at school, at work and in the courtroom. They are exchanged between friends and argued over by enemies. The analysis of these ordinary everyday explanations is regarded as a notoriously difficult area of study by social scientists. This book offers, for the first time, a clear and comprehensive guide to the most fruitful and interesting techniques for collecting, analysing and interpreting everyday explanation. The authors have been chosen to represent the most important work being done in a variety of disciplines: social psychology, linguistics, pragmatics, artificial intelligence, ethogenics, narratology, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. Each chapter follows a uniform format. The author introduces the general theoretical outlines of the technique and describes his or her own theoretical position. The heart of the chapter is then devoted to an extended description of the analysis of a particular piece of data: a conversation, a collection of documentary accounts, or a corpus of explanatory phrases. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of this particular analytical method are assessed. Usefully organized into four parts, the book deals with the nature of explanation in general; methods for analysing the structure and content of accounts; the social context in which accounts are exchanged; and the use of rhetorical and ideological approaches to everyday explanation. Analysing Everyday Explanation is a unique casebook of methods which will prove invaluable to all social scientists.

Diagnostic formulations in psychotherapy

Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the clients talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the clients circumstances. But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer interpretations. We offer an analysis of formulations (both of the gist of the clients words and of their implications) that are diagnostic: that is, used by the professional to sharpen, clarify or refine the clients account and make it better able to provide what the professional needs to know about the clients history and symptoms. In doing so, these formulations also have the effect of shepherding the clients account towards subsequent therapeutic interpretation. In a coda, we notice that sometimes the formulations are designed discreetly. We examine one such discreet formulation in detail, and show how its very ambiguity can lead to its failure as a diagnostic probe.

A Conversation Analysis of the ‘Acquiescence’ of People with Learning Disabilities

Contrary to received wisdom, ‘acquiescence bias’ in the responses of people with learning disabilities to questioning is not a simple phenomenon, and certainly not one to be laid at the door solely of people with learning disabilities themselves. Rather, it is probably an artefact of the conversational organization of interviews as tests. Analysis of Quality of Life assessment interviews show, we argue, that there is probably no uniform ‘acquiescent’ motivation which accounts for all inconsistencies and agreements that might be produced under such circumstances. Rather, the interviews logic produces a range of pseudo-acquiescent responses in the face of interviewers reformulations, and their pursuit of plausible and acceptable answers. There is also evidence of ‘anti-acquiescence’, in which respondents resist pressure to change their answers. We conclude that the traditional notion of submissive, willing-to-please acquiescence is probably unsustainable on current evidence, and ought to be replaced by a more respectful account of the linguistic and interpersonal competence of people with learning disabilities.

”For she who knows who she is:” Managing accountability in online forum messages’

The recent application of Conversation Analysis (CA) to online forum communication has been successful in explicating the sequential ties among messages. In this article, we build on those foundations and show how CA’s illumination of the structural resources of interaction can provide an analysis of accountable action in an online forum setting. We report a case study to illustrate how a user, in carrying off a ‘declaration of love,’ attends to her accountability in posting such a message. We analyse the message’s placement as an initiating first turn; its prefatory work as an announcement; its selection of next speaker; and its internal design as a turn-at-interaction. We show how these features are oriented to in the first message sent in response. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the usefulness of CA in illuminating users’ orientation to the accountable norms of online behavior.

Self‐disclosure as a situated interactional practice

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the degree of acquaintance with the disclosed-to recipient, the expectation of reciprocity and so on), or manipulated as a causative independent variable (which affects such things as the perception of the discloser, the effectiveness of therapy, and so on). This treatment of self-disclosure, embedded in a research culture of a-contextual, experimenter-defined phenomena, risks missing the point that in ordinary life, self-disclosure is a social performance which must be brought off in interaction, and has its interactional context and its interactional consequences. When we examine examples of such brought-off disclosures, we start to see patterns in their design as voluntary revelations of personal data, and patterns in their social function, which are invisible to the standard factors and measures paradigm of experimental social psychology.

Promoting choice and control in residential services for people with learning disabilities

This paper discusses the gap between policy goals and practice in residential services for people with learning disabilities. Drawing on a nine month ethnographic study of three residential services, it outlines a range of obstacles to the promotion of choice and control that were routinely observed in the culture and working practices of the services. Issues discussed include conflicting service values and agendas, inspection regimes, an attention to the bigger decisions in a persons life when empowerment could more quickly and effectively be promoted at the level of everyday practice, problems of communication and interpretation and the pervasiveness of teaching. We offer a range of suggestions as to how these obstacles might be tackled.

Offering Choices to People with Intellectual Disabilities: An Interactional Study.

BACKGROUND At the level of policy recommendation, it is agreed that people with intellectual impairments ought to be given opportunities to make choices in their lives; indeed, in the UK, the Mental Capacity Act of 2005 enshrines such a right in law. However, at the level of practice, there is a dearth of evidence as to how choices are actually offered in everyday situations, which must hinder recommendations to change. METHOD This qualitative interactional study, based on video recordings in British residential homes, combines ethnography with the fine-grained methods of Conversation Analysis. RESULTS We identify six conversational practices that staff use to offer choices to residents with intellectual disabilities. CONCLUSIONS We describe the unwanted consequences of some of these practices, and how the institutional imperative to solicit clear and decisive choice may sometimes succeed only in producing the opposite.

Analysing psychotherapy in practice

The Oxford English Dictionary defines modern psychotherapy as “the treatment of disorders of the mind or personality by psychological or psychophysiological methods.” Administering electroconvulsive shocks would, however, hardly count as psychotherapy; the common assumption is it that, in psychotherapies, the means of healing is talk. Not all talk is therapeutic, and the history of psychotherapy involves not just formulating new psychological theories but evolving new and distinct ways of talking with clients. This book is an effort to describe and to understand these distinct ways of talking. Many psychoanalytic historiographies locate the invention of psychotherapy in Breuer’s work with a patient they called Anna O. (described in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, 1991/1895) at the end of nineteenth century. Anna O. found that narrating her worries and fantasies helped to relieve her symptoms and she coined the phrase “the talking cure” to describe what she was doing. Freud used her case retrospectively to document the invention of psychoanalysis, which became the first form of psychotherapy. Rather soon, however, there emerged other ways of doing and thinking about “the talking cure,” and at least since 1950s, the field of psychotherapy has been characterized by the multitude of (often rival) approaches. In psychotherapy with individual patients, client-centred psychotherapy gained influence in the 1950s (see e.g. Rogers, 1951), and cognitive-behavioural therapies have been increasingly popular since the 1970s (see e.g. Dryden, 2007). Alongside psychotherapies with individuals, group and family therapies based on psychoanalytic, system-theoretical, and later on social-constructionist ideas have been influential since the 1950s and 1960s. Each school of individual, group, or family therapy is characterized by specific theoretical ideas about mind, behaviour, and social relations, and about the ways in which these may change. While, for example, psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapies emphasize the importance of unconscious

Producing a ‘cognition’

Many professional assessment devices (questionnaires, interview schedules and so on) are designed to harvest informants’ cognitions as stable, internally-represented, information-processed conceptions of the world. If one dissents from this notion of what beliefs, knowledge and opinions are, then one is freer to see how they are produced, in interaction, as artefacts that serve some interactional (and, in the case of the interview I consider here) institutional purpose. I give an example from the recording of the ‘cognitions’ of a person with a learning disability, and try to show how they are shaped by institutional requirements as to what is to count as recordable in the circumstances. ‘In the circumstances’ is an analyst’s stance: for the members involved, the cognitions are rock-solid discoveries, and will remain so until challenged.

Interviewing Persons with a Learning Disability: How Setting Lower Standards May Inflate Well-Being Scores

To be psychometrically valid, standard questions are meant to be delivered as they appear on the interview schedule—or by nonleading paraphrase—and the respondents’ answers exactly recorded. Yet, inspection of a set of transcripts of quality-of-life assessments of people with a learning disability (in North American terminology, mental retardation) shows massive deviation from this ideal. What is unsurprising is that interviewers frequently edit questions to address their interviewees’ limited cognitive competence. What is more pragmatically and interactionally interesting is that interviewers also redesign questions “sensitively” in ways that lower the social and personal criteria for a high score. Unofficially lowering the bar in this way might seem generous, but it constructs the respondent as impaired. It also means that respondents may end up getting high quality-of-life scores on unambitious questions one would not ask of people without a learning disability and that do not appear on the official questionnaire.