Promoting choice and control in residential services for people with learning disabilities

This paper discusses the gap between policy goals and practice in residential services for people with learning disabilities. Drawing on a nine month ethnographic study of three residential services, it outlines a range of obstacles to the promotion of choice and control that were routinely observed in the culture and working practices of the services. Issues discussed include conflicting service values and agendas, inspection regimes, an attention to the bigger decisions in a person's life when empowerment could more quickly and effectively be promoted at the level of everyday practice, problems of communication and interpretation and the pervasiveness of teaching. We offer a range of suggestions as to how these obstacles might be tackle

Conversational shaping: staff-members' solicitation of talk from people with an intellectual impairment

In initiating and maintaining talk with people with intellectual impairments, members of care staff use a range of recurrent conversational devices. The authors list six of the more common of these devices, explain how they work interactionally, and speculate on how they serve institutional interests. As in other dealings between staff members and the people with intellectual impairments they support, there is a pervasive dilemma between, on one hand, encouraging participation and, on the other, getting institutional jobs done. The authors show how the practices of encouraging talk that they describe move between the two horns of that dilemma

How adults with a profound intellectual disability engage others in interaction

Using video records of everyday life in a residential home, we report on what interactional practices are used by people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities to initiate encounters. There were very few initiations, and all presented difficulties to the interlocutor; one (which we call "blank recipiency") gave the interlocutor virtually no information at all on which to base a response. Only when the initiation was of a new phase in an interaction already under way (for example, the initiation of an alternative trajectory of a proposed physical move) was it likely to be successfully sustained. We show how interlocutors (support staff; the recording researcher) responded to initiations verbally, as if to neurotypical speakers - but inappropriately for people unable to comprehend, or to produce well-fitted next turns. This misreliance on ordinary speakers' conversational practices was one factor that contributed to residents abandoning the interaction in almost all cases. We discuss the dilemma confronting care workers

The staff are your friends : Intellectually disabled identities in official discourse and interactional practice.

Talk between care staff and people with learning disabilities may reveal a conflict between official policy and actual social practice. We explore a case in which care staff are in the process of soliciting residents' views on ‘relationships’. Ostensibly, this is an empowering part of a group meeting, meant to help the residents understand their relationships with the people around them, and to value those which are positive. However, the talk mutates from solicitation to instruction and, in doing so, provides a vivid case of people with learning disabilities being attributed social rights more limited than is consistent with institutional service policy. We unpack the play of category membership in this episode to illustrate how conflicting agendas can lead to the construction, even in ostensibly empowering encounters, of identities actively disavowed at the level of official discourse