Life is out there: a comment on Griffin

Open ended interviews remain the default data generation technique for qualitative psychology and sociology. The commentary raises questions with Griffin’s understanding of naturalistic materials and the emic/etic distinction. It reiterates problems in the use of open ended interviews, and repeats the case for more considered support for their use

Discourse analytic practice

Discourse analytic practic

Generic Incomparability of Infinite-Dimensional Entangled States

In support of a recent conjecture by Nielsen (1999), we prove that the phenomena of 'incomparable entanglement'--whereby, neither member of a pair of pure entangled states can be transformed into the other via local operations and classical communication (LOCC)--is a generic feature when the states at issue live in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.Comment: 3 pages, final published version, minor adjustment

Discursive psychology: mind and reality in practice

Discursive psychology: mind and reality in practic

Designing the recipient: managing advice resistance in institutional settings

In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the repackaging of resisted advice in more idiomatic form; (2) the combination of that advice with a tag question that treats the client as able to confirm the reformulated version despite their prior resistance to it; and (3) the dampening of the response requirement by continuing past the tag question, which would normally constitute a transition place for the advice recipient. We also discuss the tension between the contrasting projects of callers and call takers, which can lead to both delivery of advice and the resistance of that advice. In doing this we highlight the way in which advice may function as an element of broader institutional practices. In specifying these practices we draw upon analytic tools employed by conversation analysts, including various features of sequence organization (Schegloff 2007) and turn design (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). The analysis is intended to contribute to three main areas of research: to the applied topic of managing advice resistance, to the growing literature on understanding institutional practices, and to broader concerns in conversation analytic and discursive psychological literature. These concerns include the status of the “psychological” in interaction and the specification of actions across turns and sequences of talk

Discursive constructionism

Discursive constructionis

Threats: power, family mealtimes and social influence

One of the most basic topics in social psychology is the way one agent influences the behaviour of another. This paper will focus on threats, which are an intensified form of attempted behavioural influence. Despite the centrality to the project of social psychology little attention has been paid to threats. This paper will start to rectify this oversight. It reviews early examples of the way social psychology handles threats and highlights key limitations and presuppositions about the nature and role of threats. By contrast, we subject them to a programme of empirical research. Data comprise video records of a collection of family mealtimes that include pre-school children. Threats are recurrent in this material. A preliminary conceptualization of features of candidate threats from this corpus will be used as an analytic start point. A series of examples are used to explicate basic features and dimensions that build the action of threatening. The basic structure of the threats uses a conditional logic: if the recipient continues problem action/does not initiate required action then negative consequences will be produced by the speaker. Further analysis clarifies how threats differ from warnings and admonishments. Sequential analysis suggests threats set up basic response options of compliance or defiance. However, recipients of threats can evade these options by, for example, reworking the unpleasant upshot specified in the threat, or producing barely minimal compliance. The implications for broader social psychological concerns are explored in a discussion of power, resistance and asymmetry; the paper ends by reconsidering the way social influence can be studied in social psychology

Inequality in action

This paper highlights some of the issues that arise when focusing on inequality (and similar notions) as participants’ concerns. It emphasises the value of understanding constructions of inequality in terms of how they are (a) oriented to action; (b) situated (sequentially, institutionally, rhetorically); and (c) constructed from discursive resources and constructive of social and mental worlds. These points are illustrated with an example from a call to a child protection helpline. This illustrates how a particular description of inequality can be oriented to action, constructed and situated. This is the basis for some more general observations on the nature of inequality as an object in interaction

Discursive Psychology: Mind and Reality in Practice

J. Potter and A. Hepburn, Discursive psychology: mind and reality in practice, 2007, Chapters © their authors reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive version of this piece may be found in Language, Discourse and Social Psychology edited by Ann Weatherall, Bernadette M. Watson and Cindy Gallois which can be accessed from www.palgrave.co

Enantioselective Synthesis of Sealutomicin C

The sealutomicins are a family of anthraquinone antibiotics featuring an enediyne (sealutomicin A) or Bergman-cyclized aromatic ring (sealutomicins B–D). Herein we report the development of an enantioselective organocatalytic method for the synthesis of dihydroquinolines and the use of the developed method in the total synthesis of sealutomicin C which features a transannular cyclization of an aryllithium onto a γ-lactone as a second key step