Michael Emmison

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.

Qualitative researchers’ understandings of their practice and the implications for data archiving and sharing

With the systematic archiving of qualitative data emerging as a distinct possibility in Australia, both the practices of qualitative research and how subsequent outputs are ‘used’ are coming under increased scrutiny and reflection. Drawing on a series of focus groups with qualitative researchers, this article critically explores the meanings ascribed to qualitative research practice and the perceived challenges posed by contemporary innovations in data management, access, and analysis through electronic archiving. The accounts presented provide much needed insight into key debates (and divergences) within the qualitative community regarding the values and meanings of qualitative practice, but also how contemporary innovations may come to challenge these core values.

From aesthetic principles to collective sentiments: The logics of everyday judgements of taste

Abstract Contemporary research into the sociology of taste has, following Bourdieu (1984), primarily emphasised the role of taste judgements as mechanisms of social and cultural power, as distinctive markers of social position, or more broadly as implicated in the reproduction of social inequality. We argue that although important, such a preoccupation with the social distribution of objectified tastes—for example in music, literature, and art—has been at the expense of investigating the everyday perceptual schemes and resources used by actors to accomplish a judgement of taste. Our argument is traced using a range of classical and contemporary literature which deals with the personal/collective tension in taste, aesthetics and fashion. We use data from a recent national survey to investigate how a sample of ordinary actors understand the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste. The analysis shows a strong collective strand in everyday definitions of taste, often linked to moral codes of interpersonal conduct. Also, taste is largely defined by people as a strategy for managing relations with others, and as a mode of self-discipline which relies on the mastery of a number of general principles that are resources for people to position their own tastes within an imagined social sphere. The paper proposes a schematic model which accounts for the range of discriminatory resources used to make judgements of taste.

Troubles Announcements and Reasons for Calling: Initial Actions in Opening Sequences in Calls to a National Children's Helpline

Calls to emergency assistance providers, and helplines more generally, have typically been analyzed from the assumption that for both caller and call taker, the primary orientation is the reason for the call. For the caller, this is one of seeking, and for the call taker, that of attempting to provide some specified help, assistance, or advice. In this article, we draw on the opening sequences on calls to “Kids Help Line,” a national Australian helpline and counseling service for children and young persons aged between 5 and 18, to show this assumption as problematic for this service. The helpline operates from a child-centered organizational philosophy, we care, we listen, rather than we can solve your problems. Unlike many helplines in which an explicit offer of help is made in the call takers opening turn, the Kids Help Line counselors provide only an organizational identification. The consequence of this design is that the onus is placed on the caller to account for the call, a process that typically involves the announcement or description of a trouble or problem and then, delivered separately, a specific reason for the call. In particular, we identify one construction in which the caller formulates their reason for the call with a claim to the effect that they do not to know what to do. Utterances such as this work, we argue, as sequence closing devices, a method by which the caller demonstrates the trouble has been adequately described and that they are now ready for counseling advice. We investigate the structural and sequential features of the opening turns that provide for the occurrence of this particular accounting work.

Social class and social identity: A comment on Marshall et.al

The continuing persistence of strong class identification is one of the findings highlighted by Marshall, Rose, Vogler and Newby in their recent (1988) enquiry into class processes in Britain. In this comment we examine critically the methodological techniques deployed by them in the elicitation of this information. We argue that the finding is questionable and the conclusions drawn from it are unwarranted. Data from our own survey of class processes in Australia suggests, in contrast, that the discursive salience of class for identity is almost minimal.

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.

Transnational family reunions as lived experience: Narrating a Salvadoran autoethnography

This article explores the complex processes and emotions that characterise transnational family reunion. Using the tools of experimental ethnography, it unpacks the experiences of Marcela, a young Australian-Salvadoran, who embarked on a family reunion with members of her transnationally dispersed family in various locales: London (Ontario), Los Angeles, various towns in El Salvador, and Managua in Nicaragua. Her account of the family reunion affords an opportunity to understand the cultural complexities and emotional dynamics of these events. The encounters between guests (Marcelas family) and hosts gave rise to issues of reciprocity, envy, and guest-host dynamics. These dynamics were place specific, resulting in a much higher degree of spontaneity in encounters with other exiled family members, indicating both the shared experiences of exile and the realities, and perceptions, of socio-economic status. While the politics of reciprocity was an explicit feature in all trans-national encounters experienced by Marcelas family, it was Marcelas “cultural Australianness” that served as a constant reminder of how becoming a trans-national had changed her permanently and marked her out from her kin.

They are all ‘doing gender’ but are they are all passing? A case study of the appropriation of a sociological concept

The concept of ‘doing gender’ was placed on the sociological agenda by West and Zimmerman. In their seminal paper published in 1987, they provided a systematic theory of gender as a routine and ongoing process and outlined a distinctly ethnomethodological approach to investigating how gender is enacted, understood and rendered accountable. West and Zimmermans notion of ‘doing gender’ has subsequently become a central concept in many fields of sociological research, however, upon closer examination although many authors claim to be using the concept – in effect to be doing ‘doing gender’ – the concepts intellectual roots in ethnomethodology are not always recognised or reflected: in short not all are passing. The purpose of our study is to explore the career trajectory of this concept and to systematically assess the manner in which ‘doing’ has been employed. From a review of 226 journal articles, books, dissertations and association papers, we provide an overview of the uses of this construct and examine the ways in which ‘doing gender’ has been assimilated into current theoretical and methodological practice.

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.

Victors and Vanquished: The Social Organization of Ceremonial Congratulations and Commiserations.

Introduction The significance of ceremonial and ritual conduct or settings in human affairs has been noted by sociologists from a wide variety of theoretical persuasions. Within the functionalist tradition the social cohesion attendant upon a ceremonial occasion was, of course, pivotal to Durkheim’s analysis of suicide (Durkheim, 1952; Phillips and Feldman, 1973). For Merton (1957) it was the latent function of group solidarity which gave the Hopi rain dance its analytical distinctiveness whilst for Shils and Young (1953) the significance of the British coronation lay in its reaffirmation of tradition and continuity. For interactionists the notion of ceremony or ceremonial forms has figured more as a model or metaphor to be applied in the analysis of conduct which, when considered in the light of other criteria, does not warrant such a depiction. A good deal of Goffman’s early writing (e.g. 1972a, 1972b) employs this tactic and its application has been made in particular to medical settings by other writers (Strong, 1979; Silverman, 1984). Most recently ceremonial occasions or settings have witnessed the attention of researchers working within, or employing the findings of, conversation analysis (CA), a development which is part of a more general interest shown by CA in speech exchange in formal or institutional settings. This extension of CA research from its hitherto prevailing focus on naturally occurring conversation has been accompanied by a productive and continuing debate concerning the overall sociological contribution of CA (Goffman, 1981; Hester, 1981; Dingwall, 1980; Watson, 1983). Recent CA research which has been conducted within institutional contexts can be found in Atkinson and Drew’s (1979) analysis of verbal interaction in judicial settings; in Maynard’s (1984) research into the negotiations that constitute the discourse of plea bargaining; in Atkinson’s (1984) discussion of the techniques of political oratory; whilst Mulkay (1984) has examined the discourse of one particular ceremonial form-the Nobel Prize ceremony. Inter alia such studies have demonstrated that organizational structures characteristic of naturally occurring social interaction are operational in these institutional settings but that in addition, such settings have certain properties not found in the former. Indeed as Atkinson (1982) has argued the speech exchange typical of many institutional settings is not merely coincidental to such settings but constitutive of them: it is precisely what gives them their formality. The present paper offers some empirically grounded observations as to how this apparent paradox is possible. It can be seen both as an addition to the corpus of studies dealing with the formal analysis of speech exchange in institutional settings and secondly as an inquiry into the substantive structure of that setting-a particular ceremonial form-in its own right. The setting under consideration here is that which has increasingly come to characterise the conclusion of sports competitions or tournaments-