Suchergebnisse

Much of everyday work is done through talk between practitioner and client. Conversation Analysis is the close inspection of people's use of language in interaction. The work reported in this collection shows how CA can be used to identify, and improve, communicative practices at work

AbstractBackgroundThis study argues for displays of affect by people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities to be analysed in the course of everyday interactions with the people who support them.MethodConversation analysis is applied to the affective displays of residents of a social care service for people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities to identify how such displays are taken up and form the basis for further action.ResultsThree types of orientations to affect are identified: where the cause of the affect is unknown; where there is a proximal cause; and where the proximal cause is a prior action by a member of staff. Staff orient to affect as expressions of both feelings and cognitions, thereby providing the basis for self‐determination.ConclusionsDisplays of affect are a communicative resource for those with severe or profound impairments and must be studied in situ if they are to inform policy and everyday practice.

AbstractOfficial policy talk of "choice" for people with intellectual impairments tends toward fundamental life choices (e.g., who to marry, what job to work at) at the expense of the minor but more frequent concerns of daily living (when to wash, what to eat, where to go in the evening). Statutes and mission statements are unspecific about how any such choices, big or small, are, or should be, offered. They are also silent on the relation of exercising "choices" to institutional imperatives. To examine these particulars the authors undertook an examination of how choice policies are actualized in day‐to‐day activities in two group homes. Data were drawn from a broader ethnographic study of residential services for people with intellectual disabilities serviced by National Health Service Trust in the United Kingdom. Conversation analysis, used to explicate the interactions, showed how staff, although undoubtedly well‐meaning, use the discourse of choice to promote institutional managerial objectives, thus demonstrating a gap between practice and overarching policy theory and recommendations.

A number of ways of treating talk and textual data are identified which fall short of discourse analysis. They are: (1) under-analysis through summary; (2) underanalysis through taking sides; (3) under-analysis through over-quotation or through isolated quotation; (4) the circular identification of discourses & mental constructs; (5) false survey; (6) analysis that consists in simply spotting features. We show, by applying each of these to an extract from a recorded interview, that none of them actually analyze the data. We hope that illustrating shortcomings in this way will encourage further development of rigorous discourse analysis in social psychology.