Mark Rapley

‘You Couldn't Say “No”, Could You?’: Young Men's Understandings of Sexual Refusal

While several psychological theories of rape have been developed, Tannens ‘ miscommunication’ model is dominant, informing ‘expert’ and popular accounts alike. Rape is constructed as an extreme example of miscommunication – whereby womens ‘failure’ to say ‘no’ is interpreted by men as sexual consent. Kitzinger and Frith have demonstrated that young women have an implicit understanding of the normative interactional structure of refusal, and it is this that explains their difficulty in ‘just saying no’ to unwanted sex. However, Kitzinger and Friths study could not demonstrate, but only argue, that young men share this sophisticated understanding, such that women saying ‘no’ should not be necessary to refuse sexual intimacy. Here we extend Kitzinger and Friths study, via the analysis of data from two focus groups held with young men. We demonstrate that, as Kitzinger and Frith suggested, men not only do have a refined ability to hear verbal refusals that do not contain the word ‘no’, but also – and importantly – an equally refined ability to ‘hear’ the subtlest of non-verbal sexual refusals.

A case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis: Sir Karl and Francis B. slug it out on the consulting room floor

Drawing upon Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, and in the frame of what is currently called discursive psychology, we open up a significant macro-social problem - indeed a global problem - to inspection at a local level by reference to a naturally-occurring instance of talk-in-interaction. The problem is the documented increase in diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in recent years - particularly for boys, particularly in Anglophone countries, and particularly by reference to school-based conduct - and its consequent ‘treatment’ by amphetamines (including Ritalin [methylphenidate]) and related medications (Singh, 2002a). The local instance of talk-in-interaction is a transcript of a diagnostic session involving a young boy, his parents and a paediatrician. We aim to show that the local instance can shed light on just how routine and mundane it is for children to be positively diagnosed and medicated merely on presentation for the possibility of the ‘disorder’, even when parents are manifestly sceptical about (even resistive to) the diagnosis and its methodological grounds.

Playing procrustes: The interactional production of a "psychological sense of community"

The notion of “sense of community” is central to community psychologys conceptual framework. It has been described as the disciplines “overarching value” (Sarason, 1974). Allied to the notion of “sense of community” are other constructsempowerment, representation, solidaritywhich map the empirical concerns of community psychology. Together, these notions make important rhetorical claims about the modus operandi of community psychology in both research and practice. This article first seeks to illuminate some of the tensions between the rhetorical and ideological commitments of the discipline, and the primarily quantitative research methodologies it has traditionally employed. Second, a conversation analysis of the employment of a qualitatively inspired methodologythe semi-structured interviewin researching “sense of community” suggests that the uncautious embrace of a qualitative paradigm, as an approach more rhetorically congruent with the values of the discipline, may entail as many problems as it resolves.

‘There are orphans in Africa still looking for my hands’: African women refugees and the sources of emotional distress

Abstract This paper explores issues of emotional distress expressed by refugee women from Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea who now live in Western Australia. Qualitative data from interviews and focus groups are used to illustrate differences in understandings of distress, including depression and anxiety, and women’s understandings of the causes of, and solutions to, what have been defined by service providers as ‘mental health’ problems. The findings challenge Western biomedical approaches to dealing with prolonged grief and distress among migrant communities, which frequently reinforce disempowerment. We argue that it is the structural determinants of powerlessness that need to be addressed, rather than individual psyches.

What can psychological terms actually do? (Or: If Sigmund calls, tell him it didn't work)

In this paper we describe some counter-psychological approaches to psychological terms such as ‘thinking’, ‘understanding’, ‘intending’ and so on. We draw on the work of Coulter, Ryle, Sacks and Wittgenstein in order to do this and, initially, to sketch out some general convergences between pragmatics, conversation analysis and discursive psychology. From here we go on to rehearse two analyses by Harvey Sacks; the first focusing on a single utterance (“I just had a thought”) and the second on a more extensive case of “inference making”. Because this leads us to doubt the often-assumed view that psychological terms have meaning by referring to mental states, we end with the question of ordinary, everyday practices of ‘referring to mental states’—an issue marking a potential difference between some Wittgensteinian scholars and discursive psychology.

Ghost: Do Not Forget; This Visitation / Is But to Whet Thy Almost Blunted Purpose Culture, Psychology and ‘Being Human’

After a brief inspection of some cases where people apparently ‘mis-identify’ others, we draw some initial and tentative conclusions about ways of thinking about ‘who people are’. We then move on to look at underlying assumptions in psychology about this very question; with these assumptions considered under the rubric of psychology’s ‘model of being human’. Locating problems with this model on the basis of its affinity with Kantian thought, we conclude that what it misses is an understanding of cultural order as the primary medium for human existence. Against this, we propose instead—via Harvey Sacks in particular and ethnomethodological thinking in general—that to be in the world is always to be in the cultural world. Consequently, what persons can do and be is never a form of governance or control by fixed rules; rather, it is always already an orientation to publicly known and material forms of cultural order. We end by speculating on the general consequences of such a re-formulated ‘model of being human’ for a paradigm of psychology yet to come.

The Meaning of Coping for Psychiatric Patients

Contemporary psychiatric theory holds that a precipitant of major mental illness is the inability of some vulnerable individuals to cope with the difficulties of everyday life. Such mentally ill people are characterized as having deficient, dysfunctional, or absent coping skills. Recently, researchers have exerted considerable effort to distinguish between productive and nonproductive coping. In this article, we argue that not only are such conceptualizations reliant on reductive, circular logic, but they also miss the essentially rational, local, and individual nature of coping in psychiatric patients’ lives. We used semistructured interviews and thematic analyses of psychiatric patients’ descriptions of their coping. Patients reported that professional intervention reduced their ability to cope, that they distrusted the mental health system and its professionals, that coping mechanisms were misinterpreted, that situational crises modulated coping, and that sometimes coping was just “not coping.” We argue for a more respectful, nuanced understanding of coping among mental health professionals.

Clarifying the point: A brief response to Sharrock and Coulter

This is a short response to a particular point made by our colleagues Wes Sharrock and Jeff Coulter in their otherwise convincing and devastating critique of the ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) avatar of cognitivism. We think they may have misunderstood what we once said about the use of ‘mental predicates’ and wish to clarify the point in question.

Re-presenting culture and the self: (Dis)agreeing in theory and in practice

We try to show that the fundamental grounds of psychological thinking about the domains of ‘culture’ and ‘the self’ (and their possible connections) are necessarily representationalist in the Cartesian sense. Rehearsing Heidegger’s critique of representationalism as the basic wrong turning taken by modern thinking generally (and by psychology in particular) with respect to what human being is, we move on to the possibility of a counter-representationalist re-specification of the concept of culture. Here we mobilize ideas from Husserl and Heidegger (again), and also from the basic ethnomethodological theory of Sacks and Garfinkel, to argue for the primacy of culture as an order of practical-actional affairs that makes conceptualizations of a putative ‘self’ always an effect of, and subsequent to, that very (cultural) order. Accordingly, we end by briefly analysing an actual case of an explicitly cultural use of a supposedly intensional term, ‘agree’.

Self-Glorification and its Others The Discursive-Moral Management of Sports Management

The question of the relation(s) between sport and everyday life is a fraught one—ranging from traditional claims that sport is a form of escape from everyday life to the view that sport is a deep part of the ontological conditions of being human. In this analysis, the authors offer an alternative position based on the inspection of actual, everyday discursive materials concerning sport and its management. Although high theory might consider the sports and letters pages of newspapers as trivial texts and, therefore, beneath the scope of serious intellectual reflection, we try to show how the very ordinariness of these materials can furnish a way into the sports/life controversy via their reciprocal involvement in the practical management of moral character.