48 research outputs found

    Citizens getting help: interactions at the constituency office

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    This thesis examines a previously unstudied site of interaction: the constituency office. At the constituency office, Members of Parliament (MPs) hold MP surgeries , during which they help constituents to solve their personal difficulties. This thesis provides the first analysis of interactions at the constituency office. It is the only place where ordinary citizens can meet their MP; as such, it also provides the first analysis of face-to-face, unmediated interactions between politicians and their constituents. For this study, 12.5 hours of interactional data were recorded at the office of an MP in the United Kingdom, comprising over 80 encounters between office staff, the MP, and their constituents. The MP was of the majority ( government ) party at the time of recording. The data were analyzed using conversation analysis (CA), in order to investigate how the social activities of the constituency office were accomplished through interaction. The first analytic chapter reveals the overall structure of constituency office encounters, as well as examining what constituents say when they call or visit the office, and how they express that they are in need of assistance. This chapter finds that constituents avoid making direct requests of their MP, and instead use narrative descriptions. These descriptions manage interactional challenges including the unknown nature of the institution (Stokoe, 2013b), contingency and entitlement (Drew & Curl, 2008), reasonableness and legitimacy (Edwards & Stokoe, 2007; Heritage & Robinson, 2006), and recruitment (Kendrick & Drew, 2016). The second analytic chapter examines the action of offering, and finds it to be the central mechanism for transacting service. The staff use different offer designs to index different nuances in the offering action, such as asking permission or confirming an activity. Both the first and second analytic chapters show that systematic deployment of offers help control the direction of the encounters and tacitly instruct constituents as to what services are available. Furthermore, both of these chapters show the flexibility participants employed in turn design and action ascription, which extends previous descriptions of how requests and offers are constructed (Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Curl, 2006) and supports recent calls for a more nuanced approach to action description from conversation analysts (Kendrick & Drew, 2014; Sidnell & Enfield, 2014). The third analytic chapter investigates the ostensibly political context of the constituency office, and how the MP and constituents raise political topics in conversation. The chapter finds that the term political is challenging to define in live interactions, and relies on the concept of politicizing (Hay, 2007) statements that upgrade (or downgrade) a topic into greater (or lesser) public and governmental concern. Both the MP and constituents were found to initiate political topics, but in different ways. The MP initiated political topics in explicit references to government, in order to provide evidence that the government was aligned with constituents interests. The constituents initiated political topics in vague and indirect references to recent policy changes, and avoided implicating the MP in any criticisms. The findings suggest that constituents privilege interactional norms (such as not criticizing a co-present interlocutor) over any potential interest in making political critiques. The chapter also discusses what impact these findings may have on concepts such as power and evasion . The final analytic chapter assesses the concept of rapport , finding that it is difficult for both participants and analysts to determine long-term outcomes from local, interactional occurrences in interaction. Rapport is important for MPs who may be attempting to build a personal vote relationship with constituents, but this chapter also finds that constituents have a stake in building rapport in order to receive the best (or any) service. The chapter finds that while traditional practices for building rapport , such as doing small talk or finding common ground, are problematic to employ and assess from an interactional perspective, other local outcomes such as progressivity (Fogarty, Augoustinos & Kettler, 2013) and affiliation (Clark, Drew & Pinch, 2003) may be more useful indicators of positive interactions. This chapter concludes that we need a more nuanced, and interactionally-based, framework to train practitioners (and clients) in effective communication practices. This thesis challenges the conversation analytic literature by finding that the constituency office setting revolves around a more flexible ascription of requests than many studies have previously accepted, and that we can analyze actions as if on a spectrum, rather than in bounded categories. The thesis also contributes to the political discourse literature by finding that constituents activities at the constituency office are strongly influenced by interactional norms, rather than political attitudes. Finally, this thesis provides a basis from which to study the constituency office, as a site of service interaction

    Making ‘politics’ relevant: How constituents and a Member of Parliament raise political topics at constituency surgeries

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    This paper investigates an area of political discourse that has hitherto existed in an analytic ‘black box’: the constituency office. We focus on the interactions between ordinary British people as they engage directly in ‘political’ discussions with their Member of Parliament. While the majority of surgery talk surrounds complaints about services, we focus on sequences of talk in which either citizens or the MP make ‘political’ topics relevant. Eighty consultations were video-recorded, anonymized and transcribed, and the data analysed using conversation analysis. We found that MP-initiated political comments portray the government as aligned with constituents’ needs, whereas constituents use political comments largely to criticize the government. Constituents privilege the interactional contingencies over other issues. Overall, the paper contributes to our understanding of how constituents navigate interactional and political contingencies in interactions with their representative

    Offers of assistance in politician-constituent interaction

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    How do politicians engage with and offer to assist their constituents; the people who vote them into power? We address the question by analyzing a corpus of 80 interactions recorded at the office of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom, and comprising telephone calls between constituents and the MP’s clerical ‘caseworkers’ as well as face to face encounters with MPs in their fortnightly ‘surgeries’. The data were transcribed, then analysed using conversation analysis, focusing on the design and placement of offers of assistance. We identified three types of offers within a longer ‘offering’ sequence: 1) ‘proposal offers’, which typically appear first in any offering sequence, in which politicians and caseworkers make proposals to help their constituents using formats that request permission to do so, or check that the constituent does indeed want help (e.g., “do you want me to”; “we could
”); 2) ‘announcement offers’, which appear second, and indicate that something has been decided and confirm the intention to act (e.g., “I will do X”), and 3) ‘request offers’, which appear third, and take for form “let me do X”. Request offers indicate that the offer is available but cannot be completed until the current conversation is closed; they also appear in environments in which the constituent reissues their problems and appears dissatisfied with the offers so far. The paper contributes to what we know about making offers in institutional settings, as well as shedding the first empirical light on the workings of the constituency office: the site of engagement between everyday members of the public and their elected representatives

    Getting service at the constituency office: Analyzing citizens' encounters with their Member of Parliament

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    In this paper, we present an analysis of how constituents procure services at the constituency office of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom. This paper will investigate how several previously documented interactional practices (e.g. entitlement) combine at the constituency office in a way that secures service. From a corpus of 12.5 hours of interaction, and using conversation analysis, we examine constituents’ telephone calls and meetings with constituency office staff and the MP, identifying practices constituents use. First, constituents opened encounters with bids to tell narratives. Second, constituents presented lengthy and detailed descriptions of their difficulties. These descriptions gave space to manage issues of legitimacy and entitlement, while simultaneously recruiting assistance. Third, we examine ways in which constituents display uncertainty about how the institution of the constituency office functions, and what services are available. The paper offers original insights into how constituency services are provided, and how constituency offices give access and support to ordinary citizens, while expanding the conversation analytic literature on institutional service provision

    Multi-Purpose Heart Valve Therapy Assembly Fixture

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    STATEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY: The complete senior project report was submitted to the project advisor and sponsors. The results of this project are of a confidential nature and will not be published at this time

    Exploring Nurse Responses to Spontaneous Breastfeeding Episodes During Routine Infant Health Checks in Finland: A Multimodal Conversation Analytic Approach

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    Support for mothers’ uptake and longevity in breastfeeding is a global health priority. The benefits of breastfeeding are well documented, ranging from immediate health benefits for the infant that include provision of the best nutrition, to longer-term impacts such as reducing the risk of future digestive complications and obesity in adulthood. We analyze how impromptu breastfeeding might be supported by health-care nurses in Finnish maternity and child health clinics during routine infant health checks. The video data analyzed explore naturally occurring breastfeeding during these clinic encounters, using the analysis of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) approach to explore breastfeeding interactions between mothers, infants, and nurses. Findings demonstrate that, in extract 1 the nurse makes herself freely available, offering verbal and physical support when needed, and in extract 2 the mother manages a close intimate interaction feeding her baby whilst also engaging in knowledge exchange regarding important information with the nurse. We discuss how spontaneous breastfeeding interactions during routine clinic visits provide opportunities for nurses to support breastfeeding, where they are acknowledged as rather complex activities requiring focus. Considerations for professional practice are made by exploring how these early perinatal visits provide opportunities for nurses to observe and converse with mothers about how they are managing breastfeeding. A further conclusion suggests that an EMCA methodological exploration of breastfeeding interactions can inform future nurse practice in Finland and other countries

    Cries of Pleasure and Pain : Vocalizations Communicating How Touch Feels in Romantic Relationships

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    Research on interaction has recently ventured into the domain of sensoriality, hitherto considered inaccessible for video analysis. This article contributes to this emerging field by targeting the interface of touch and vocal sound, dissecting the intersubjective potential of sounding when bodies are intertwined. Studying naturally occurring affective episodes between romantic partners at their homes with the methods of multimodal interaction analysis, we demonstrate how vocalization can express comfort and thus lead to extension of mutual bodily contact, or inform of discomfort, which leads to swift release of the problematic contact. We argue that, by providing immediate and nuanced access to other participants’ ongoing bodily experiences, haptic sensoriality is partially distributed into the auditory domain. The relevance of progressivity in body contact is continuously negotiated and has moral, social, and relational implications, providing grounds for continuous realization of consent. Data are in Finnish.Peer reviewe

    The conversational rollercoaster: conversation analysis and the public science of talk

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    How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This paper presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon, and its transcribed recordings as public data. We examine the inherent contradictions that conversation analysis is simultaneously obscure yet highly cited; it studies an object that people understand intuitively, yet routinely produces counter-intuitive findings about talk. We describe a novel methodology for engaging the public in a science exhibition event, and show how our ‘conversational rollercoaster’—involving live recording, transcription and public-led analysis—addressed the challenge of demonstrating how talk can become an informative object of scientific research. We conclude by encouraging researchers not only to engage in a public dialogue, but also to find ways to actively engage people in taking a scientific approach to talk as a pervasive, structural feature of their everyday lives

    Offers of assistance in politician–constituent interaction

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    This paper was accepted in the journal Discourse Studies [© Sage] and the definitive version is available at http:dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445615602376How do politicians engage with and offer to assist their constituents; the people who vote them into power? We address the question by analyzing a corpus of 80 interactions recorded at the office of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom, and comprising telephone calls between constituents and the MP’s clerical ‘caseworkers’ as well as face to face encounters with MPs in their fortnightly ‘surgeries’. The data were transcribed, then analysed using conversation analysis, focusing on the design and placement of offers of assistance. We identified three types of offers within a longer ‘offering’ sequence: 1) ‘proposal offers’, which typically appear first in any offering sequence, in which politicians and caseworkers make proposals to help their constituents using formats that request permission to do so, or check that the constituent does indeed want help (e.g., “do you want me to”; “we could
”); 2) ‘announcement offers’, which appear second, and indicate that something has been decided and confirm the intention to act (e.g., “I will do X”), and 3) ‘request offers’, which appear third, and take for form “let me do X”. Request offers indicate that the offer is available but cannot be completed until the current conversation is closed; they also appear in environments in which the constituent reissues their problems and appears dissatisfied with the offers so far. The paper contributes to what we know about making offers in institutional settings, as well as shedding the first empirical light on the workings of the constituency office: the site of engagement between everyday members of the public and their elected representatives
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