‘Do you think it’s a crime?’ Building joint understanding of victimisation in calls for help

© The Author(s) 2019. Society has a moral obligation to help victims, but who is recognised as a victim is a contentious issue. Social interaction is a key site where shared understandings of victimisation are built. This article analyses calls to a Victim Support helpline using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Callers described experiences of crimes to account for requesting help. Call-takers claimed the rights to describe and assess callers’ experiences in terms of institutional constraints. Call-takers disavowed the category crime to deny callers’ requests and ascribed the category crime to accountably offer help. Participants negotiated their respective rights to describe callers’ experiences and determine the kind of help needed. The analyses demonstrate how participants’ different understandings of victimisation were consequential for the delivery or withholding of support.Contribution has been accepted for publication in the journal.</div

‘I’m calling in regard to my son’: Entitlement, obligation, and opportunity to seek help for others

© 2020 The British Psychological Society From mundane acts like lending a hand to high-stakes incidents like calling an ambulance, help is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Social relations shape who we help and how. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of an understudied form of help – seeking help for others. Drawing on a corpus of recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how social relations were demonstrably relevant when callers sought help for others. I used membership categorization analysis and sequential conversation analysis to document how participants used categories to build and interpret requests for help on behalf of others. Categorical relationships between help-seekers, help-recipients, and potential help-providers were consequential in determining whether callers’ requests were justified and if help could be provided. The findings show that different categorical relationships configured seeking help for others as a matter of entitlement, obligation, or opportunity. Analysing the categories participants use in naturally occurring social interaction provides an emic perspective on seeking help for others. This kind of help-seeking offers a fruitful area for discursive psychology to develop new conceptualizations of help and social relations

Identity and action: Help-seeking requests in calls to a victim support service

The nature of the link between identity and action is a fundamental question for social science. One focus in psychology is how actions like seeking help are implicated in matters of identity. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of identity and help in social interaction. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 400 recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how participants oriented to the link between identity and help. With attention to epistemic, deontic, and affective relations between participants, I analysed how identity was demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential for building and interpreting help-seeking requests. Participants displayed an understanding that seeking help from Victim Support necessarily implicates identity. Callers’ identities as victims or clients rendered their help-seeking accountable and invoked identities for call-takers as representatives of a support service. The findings show that identity and help are mutually constitutive. Seeking help constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities as victims constituted their requests for help. I suggest that analysing identity and help in social interaction provides evidence for the mutually constitutive link between identity and action

Feminist conversation analysis: Examining violence against women

Feminist conversation analysis is a powerful methodology for research on language, gender, and sexuality. Although this research approach has been controversial, feminist conversation analysis is a productive approach to examine how issues of gender, power, and identity are consequential in everyday social interactions. The chapter reviews feminist conversation analytic research that has examined oppression in everyday life, the organisation of the gendered social-moral order, and interventions for social change. We illustrate the methodological approach with a discussion of our research project on violence against women. Analysis of calls to a victim support service demonstrates how women disclose violence and negotiate the meanings of victimhood while seeking help. Our findings show that callers described themselves and their problems in ways that invoked common-sense cultural knowledge about gendered violence. Analysing the turn-by-turn unfolding of social interaction provides insight on longstanding feminist questions, such as the difficulties of disclosing violence, women’s experiences with criminal justice institutions, and the practicalities of seeking support. Focusing on what people do and say as they seek help can be used to improve the delivery of service, thus making a practice difference for people in need. Grounded analysis of everyday interactions thus offer remarkable potential for feminist aims

Feminist conversation analysis

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Person Reference and a Preference for Association in Emergency Calls

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‘Sorry everything’s in bags’: The accountability of selling bread at a market during the COVID-19 pandemic

Societies are undergoing enormous upheavals in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. High levels of psychological distress are widespread, yet little is known about the exact impacts at the micro-level of everyday life. The present study examines the ordinary activity of buying bread to understand changes occurring early in the crisis. A dataset of over 50 social interactions at a community market stall were video-recorded, transcribed and examined in detail using multi-modal conversation analysis. With COVID-19 came an orientation to a heightened risk of disease transmission when selling food. The bread was placed in bags, a difference which was justified as a preventative measure and morally normalised by invoking a common-sense prohibition of touching produce. Having the bread out of immediate sight was a practical challenge that occasioned the expansion of turns and sequences to look for and/or confirm what was for sale, highlighting a normative organisation between seeing and buying. The analysis shows how a preventative measure related to the pandemic was adjusted to interactionally. More broadly, this research reveals the small changes to daily life that likely contribute to the overall negative impacts on health and well-being that have been reported

Partnership as a civic process

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"lemme get uhhhhh froot": Internet memes for consciousness-raising in Aotearoa's Bird of the Year conservation campaign

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