J.M.W.J. Lamerichs

Computer-Mediated Communication: From a Cognitive to a Discursive Model

In this article, we evaluate the ways in which computer-mediated communication (CMC) has thus far been conceptualized, proposing an alternative approach. It is argued that traditional perspectives ignore participants’ everyday understanding of media use and media characteristics by relying on an individualistic and cognitive framework. The SIDE model, while improving on the definition of what may count as ‘social’ in CMC, still disregards the way in which identity is constructed and managed in everyday talk and text. To fill this gap, we offer a discursive psychological approach to online interaction. Presented here are the materials from an online discussion forum on depression. It is shown that participants’ identities do not so much mirror their inner worlds but are discourse practices in their own right. More specifically, we demonstrate how participants attend to ‘contradictory’ normative requirements when requesting support, thus performing the kind of identity work typically obscured in cognitive models.

Reflecting on your own talk: The discursive action method at work

This chapter describes how we developed a Conversation Analysis-based intervention approach, which we call the Discursive Action Method. The method aims to make people critically aware of how they talk and, on that basis, to help them shape their own practices. The method has its roots in an early statement of what Edwards and Potter termed their ‘Discursive Action Model’ (Edwards and Potter, 1993) and is based on insights from Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology1 more generally (Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992; Hepburn and Wiggins, 2007; Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998; Potter, 1996; Potter and Te Molder, 2005).

‘But How Often Does This Happen?’: Problem Reducing Responses by Coaches in Email Counselling

This chapter explores the interactional dynamics of email counselling from a conversation analytic (CA) perspective. The conceptual apparatus of CA has been successfully applied to study turn-taking and the sequential placement of email messages (cf., Stommel, 2012; Stommel & Van der Houwen, forthcoming; Vayreda & Antaki, 2009), as well as the ways in which accountability is managed in online talk to do with health (cf., Guise, Widdicombe, & McKinlay, 2007; Lamerichs & Te Molder, 2003). Participants’ interactional concerns in email counselling are therefore treated as an empirical matter and not a priori different from speakers’ orientations in spoken interaction.

Online Talk About Mental Health

There is a need to focus on research conducted on online talk about mental health in the domains of ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis (CA), Discursive Psychology (DP), and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA). We use the notion of “talk” in this article, as opposed to what could be considered a more common term such as “discourse,” to highlight that we approach computer-mediated discourse as inherently interactional. It is recipient designed and unfolds sequentially, responding to messages that have come before and building a context for messages that are constructed next. We will refer to the above domains that all share this view as CA(-related) approaches. A characterizing feature of interactional approaches to online mental health talk is their focus on in-depth analyses of relatively small amounts of data. With this focus at the center of their attention, they sit in the wider field of Discourse Analysis (DA), or Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) who use language as their lens to understand human interaction. DA and CMDA research include a much wider set of both micro- and macro-analytic language-focused approaches to capture online discourse. Of all the CA(-related) work on online materials, a disproportionally large number of studies appear to deal with (mental) health talk. We aim to answer the question what the field of research on online mental health talk has yielded in terms of findings and methodologies. Centrally, CA (-related) studies of online mental health talk have aimed to grasp the actions people accomplish and the identities they invoke when they address their health concerns. Examples of actions in online mental health talk in particular are presenting oneself, describing a problem, or offering advice. Relevant questions for the above approaches that consider language-as-social-action are how these different actions are brought off and how they are received, by closely examining contributions such as e-mail and chat postings and their subsequent responses. With a focus on talk about mental health, this article will cover studies of online support groups (OSGs, also called online communities), and interaction in online counseling programs, mainly via online chat sessions. This article is organized as follows. In the historiography, we present an overview of CA(-related) work on online mental health talk. We discuss findings from studies of online support groups (OSGs) first and then move to results from studies on online counseling. The start of our historiography section, however, sets out to briefly highlight how the Internet may offer several particularly attractive features for those with mental health problems or a mental illness. After the historiography, we discuss what an interactional approach of online mental health talk looks like and focuses on. We offer examples of empirical studies to illustrate how written contributions to a forum, and e-mails or chat posts that are part of online counseling sessions are examined as interaction and which types of findings this results in. We conclude with a review of methodological issues that pertain to the field, address the most important ethical considerations that come into play when examining online mental health talk, and will lastly highlight some areas for future research.

'You just have to cheerful really': children's account of ordinariness in trauma recovery talk

This chapter investigates children’s accounts of ordinariness when they talk about trauma and trauma recovery. We were struck by the fact that children when they were invited to talk about their experience with trauma would say things like ‘It was just a coincidence’ or ‘I just started to forget it’. Our first thoughts were that the particle ‘just’ seemed so ‘ill-fitted’ to the description of these serious, painful events, as they seemed to construct what happened as ‘nothing out of the ordinary’. Why would children describe potentially lifealtering occurrences like losing a sibling or a parent in ways that suggested it had only had a minor impact on their lives? These initial questions prompted us to explore what these mentions of ‘just’ do in children’s tellings of trauma and trauma recovery.