Sofia Lampropoulou

Shared Reading: assessing the intrinsic value of a literature-based health intervention

Public health strategies have placed increasing emphasis on psychosocial and arts-based strategies for promoting well-being. This study presents preliminary findings for a specific literary-based intervention, Shared Reading, which provides community-based spaces in which individuals can relate with both literature and one another. A 12-week crossover design was conducted with 16 participants to compare benefits associated with six sessions of Shared Reading versus a comparison social activity, Built Environment workshops. Data collected included quantitative self-report measures of psychological well-being, as well as transcript analysis of session recordings and individual video-assisted interviews. Qualitative findings indicated five intrinsic benefits associated with Shared Reading: liveness, creative inarticulacy, the emotional, the personal and the group (or collective identity construction). Quantitative data additionally showed that the intervention is associated with enhancement of a sense of ‘Purpose in Life’. Limitations of the study included the small sample size and ceiling effects created by generally high levels of psychological well-being at baseline. The therapeutic potential of reading groups is discussed, including the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value within arts-and-health interventions.

‘Greece will decide the future of Europe’: The recontextualisation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper

This article explores the representation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper and their recontextualisation through the prism of crisis. I focus on speech representation as a recontextualisation device that serves as a bridge between speech production and text consumption. Specifically, the paper addresses the discursive framing of the crisis by focusing on the ‘speakers’, namely the social actors who are represented as speaking, the actions in which they are involved and the power role relationships established between them. I argue that a polarised image of crisis is constructed and that the framing of the Greek elections in this particular broadsheet results in double-voicing that positions Greece as either dependent on or independent of Europe. This double-voicing seems to contribute to the maintenance of domination and social control and helps sustain dominant discourses circulating in the broader socio-cultural context.

What place references can do in social research interviews

Place is central to many research projects in the social sciences, but it is often taken by researchers as a given. Recently, discourse analysts have devoted more attention to the construction of place in interaction. We focus on one aspect of this construction, the process of drawing inferences from place categories and place names, in transcripts of oral history interviews. We apply membership categorization analysis (MCA) to descriptions of house types and houses, showing how some categories are presented as being shared and recognizable, and how inferences are projected. Then we apply a similar approach to the ways inferences are drawn from place names, focusing especially on proximity. Participants’ categories can be investigated by examining the ways they are used in question–answer pairs, and in the construction of turns using elaborations, contrasting pairs, negatives and qualifications. This analysis shows the work these place references do for the participants, for instance, in categorizing themselves and others and giving accounts for behaviour.

A comparative study of cognitive behavioural therapy and shared reading for chronic pain

The case for psychosocial interventions in relation to chronic pain, one of the most common health issues in contemporary healthcare, is well-established as a means of managing the emotional and psychological difficulties experienced by sufferers. Using mixed methods, this study compared a standard therapy for chronic pain, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with a specific literature-based intervention, shared reading (SR) developed by national charity, The Reader. A 5-week CBT group and a 22-week SR group for patients with chronic pain ran in parallel, with CBT group members joining the SR group after the completion of CBT. In addition to self-report measures of positive and negative affect before and after each experience of the intervention, the 10 participants kept twice-daily (12-hourly) pain and emotion diaries. Qualitative data were gathered via literary-linguistic analysis of audio/video-recordings and transcriptions of the CBT and SR sessions and video-assisted individual qualitative interviews with participants. Qualitative evidence indicates SRs potential as an alternative or long-term follow-up or adjunct to CBT in bringing into conscious awareness areas of emotional pain otherwise passively suffered by patients with chronic pain. In addition, quantitative analysis, albeit of limited pilot data, indicated possible improvements in mood/pain for up to 2 days following SR. Both findings lay the basis for future research involving a larger sample size.

Laughter, non-seriousness and transitions in social research interview transcripts

Laughter is the most frequently transcribed paralinguistic feature in social research interview transcripts, occurring even where the transcriber gives no other indication of how words were said. It is thus a useful starting point for reconstructing aspects of interaction from the traces in standard social science research transcripts. First, we examine the practices of a transcriber in recording laughter by comparing transcripts from one project to the audio recordings. We then analyse the placement of these tokens in transcripts from other projects, considering their relation to the immediately preceding and following talk, drawing on Wallace Chafe’s (2007) interpretation of laughter as the expression of a feeling of ‘non-seriousness’. The laughter marks a transition away from and back to a serious frame. We argue that attention to the recording of laughter as a variable transcription practice can draw the attention of researchers using standard orthographic transcripts to interviewees’ orientations to topics and to the interview process itself.