Celia Kitzinger

Cardiff University | CU · Cardiff Law School

Qualitative researchers attempting to protect the identities of their research participants now face a multitude of new challenges due to the wealth of information once considered private but now readily accessible online. We will draw on our research with family members of people with severe brain injury to discuss these challenges in relation to...

Anonymising qualitative research data can be challenging, especially in highly sensitive contexts such as catastrophic brain injury and end-of-life decision-making. Using examples from in-depth interviews with family members of people in vegetative and minimally conscious states, this article discusses the issues we faced in trying to maximise part...

This article aims to show the value of conversation analysis for feminist theory and practice around refusal skills training and date rape prevention. Conversation analysis shows that refusals are complex conversational interactions, incorporating delays, prefaces, palliatives, and accounts. Refusal skills training often ignores and overrides these...

Court of Protection Life-sustaining treatment decisions Covid

Much has been written about whether end-of-life law should change and what that law should be. However, the barriers and facilitators of such changes – law reform perspectives – have been virtually ignored. Why do so many attempts to change the law fail but others are successful? International Perspectives on End-of-Life Law Reform aims to address...

Much has been written about whether end-of-life law should change and what that law should be. However, the barriers and facilitators of such changes – law reform perspectives – have been virtually ignored. Why do so many attempts to change the law fail but others are successful? International Perspectives on End-of-Life Law Reform aims to address...

Objective: To clarify the concept of best interests, setting out how they should be ascertained and used to make healthcare decisions for patients who lack the mental capacity to make decisions. Context: The legal framework is the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005, which applies to England and Wales. Theory: Unless there is a valid and applicable...

This report describes the use of well as a preface to repair solutions in self-initiated repair segments. It extends our previous work on repair prefacing, which showed that repair prefaces cast a relationship between a projected repair solution and its trouble source, with each preface type casting this relationship in a distinctive way. Based on...

This article explores the links between our roles as academics, advocates, and activists, focusing on our research on treatment decisions for patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states. We describe how our work evolved from personal experience through traditional social science research to public engagement activities and then to advocac...

Background: Families of patients in vegetative or minimally conscious states are often horrified by the suggestion of withdrawing a feeding tube, even when they believe that their relative would not have wanted to be maintained in their current condition. Very little is known about what it is like to witness such a death. Aim: To understand thes...

In August 2017 a judge sanctioned withdrawal of clinically assisted nutrition and hydration from a patient who had been sustained in a vegetative state for twenty-three years, finding it “overwhelmingly in his best interests” for treatment to stop, allowing him to die. Injured in 1994, this patient had continued to receive life-sustaining treatment...

In a landmark judgment in the English Court of Protection, the judge (Charles J) found it to be in the best interests of a minimally conscious patient for clinically assisted nutrition and hydration (CANH) to be withdrawn, with the inevitable consequence that the patient would die. In making this judgment, it was accepted that the patient's level o...

This collection offers a multifaceted view of the life, research and impact of Emanuel A. Schegloff, the co-originator, with Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, of Conversation Analysis (or CA), and its leading contemporary authority. The first section introduces Schegloff’s life and work, and, using a series of interviews with him, provides a concise...

Background: This research explores the current and potential future role of independent mental capacity advocates (IMCAs) in critical care. The Mental Capacity Act (MCA) of 2005 introduced IMCAs as advocates for patients without anyone to represent their best interests, but research suggests that this role is not well understood or implemented. No...

\textbf{BACKGROUND:}$ This research explores the current and potential future role of independent mental capacity advocates (IMCAs) in critical care. The Mental Capacity Act (MCA) of 2005 introduced IMCAs as advocates for patients without anyone to represent their best interests, but research suggests that this role is not well understood or implem...

We report a single case analysis of a recorded emergency call with particular reference to the use of the non-recognitional categorical person reference ‘a personal doctor’ in the sequential context created by the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) protocol routinely used by the emergency services. We describe both the position and the composi...

Life-extending treatment, in the form of artificial nutrition and hydration, is often provided to people in permanent vegetative states (PVS) in England and Wales for many years, even when their family believes the patient would not want it and despite the fact that no court in the UK has ever found in favour of continuing such treatment for a pati...

Seventy six senior academics from 11 countries invite The BMJ’s editors to reconsider their policy of rejecting qualitative research on the grounds of low priority.They challenge the journal to develop a proactive, scholarly, and pluralist approach to research that aligns with its stated mission

Withdrawal of artificially delivered nutrition and hydration (ANH) from patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS) requires judicial approval in England and Wales, even when families and healthcare professionals agree that withdrawal is in the patient's best interests. Part of the rationale underpinning the original recommendation for such cour...

Feminist conversation analysis (CA) uses the methods of conversation analysis to investigate issues of interest to feminist scholars and to contribute to social change. Feminist CA can be used to respecify feminist concepts (such as “emotion work” or “sexual harassment”) by examining how the behaviors to which they refer are accomplished in interac...

This report identifies a distinct, and distinctly positioned, element of the repair segment—the repair preface—and focuses on or-prefacing to introduce the practice of repair prefacing and to develop an analysis of one preface type. Although or-prefaced repairs do substitute one formulation for another, the or-preface shows that the trouble source...

Purpose: To examine family perceptions of physiotherapy provided to relatives in vegetative or minimally conscious states. Method: Secondary thematic analysis of 65 in-depth narrative interviews with family members of people in vegetative or minimally conscious states. Results: Families place great significance on physiotherapy in relation to...

This chapter explores how 'proper' medical treatments are decided for people with chronic disorders of consciousness (i.e. in vegetative or minimally conscious states). Setting our empirical research in the context of current law around 'necessity' (at the emergency stage) and 'best interests' (subsequently) we draw on 65 in-depth narrative intervi...

Anonymising qualitative research data can be challenging, especially in highly sensitive contexts such as catastrophic brain injury and end-of-life decision-making. Using examples from in-depth interviews with family members of people in vegetative and minimally conscious states, this article discusses the issues we faced in trying to maximise part...

Rationale, aims and objectivesChronic disorders of consciousness (CDoC) pose significant problems of understanding for both medical professionals and the relatives and friends of the patient. This paper explores the tensions between the different interpretative resources that are drawn upon by lay people and professionals in their response to CDoC....

Throughout affluent societies there are growing numbers of people who survive severe brain injuries only to be left with long-term chronic disorders of consciousness. This patient group who exist betwixt and between life and death are variously diagnosed as in 'comatose', 'vegetative', and, more recently, 'minimally conscious' states. Drawing on a...

The training and expertise of healthcare professionals in diagnosing and treating pathology can mean that every situation is treated as an instance of illness or abnormality requiring treatment. This medicalised perspective is often evident in clinical approaches to family members of people with prolonged disorders of consciousness. This editorial...

This chapter focuses on how the methods and findings of conversation analysis (CA) have been used by scholars of gender and language. It introduces the reader to conversation analysis as a field, including its characteristic methods of data collection and analysis, and its technical specifications of key interactional phenomena. The chapter then ex...

This paper addresses, from a socio-legal perspective, the question of the significance of law for the treatment, care and the end-of-life decision making for patients with chronic disorders of consciousness. We use the phrase ‘chronic disorders of consciousness’ as an umbrella term to refer to severely brain-injured patients in prolonged comas, veg...

Some brain injured patients are left in a permanent vegetative state, i.e., they have irreversibly lost their capacity for consciousness but retained some autonomic physiological functions, such as breathing unaided. Having discussed the controversial nature of the permanent vegetative state as a diagnostic category, we turn to the question of the...

In W v M, family members made an application to the Court of Protection for withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration from a minimally conscious patient. Subsequent scholarly discussion has centred around the ethical adequacy of the judge's decision not to authorise withdrawal. This article brings a different perspective by drawing on interv...

These comments encapsulate some common themes in how people describe having a severely brain-injured relative in a coma-like condition, medically known as a ‘disorder of consciousness’. In the past it was highly unusual for such individuals to survive very long after the initial trauma that caused their injury. However, the emergence of modern medi...

These comments encapsulate some common themes in how people describe having a severely brain-injured relative in a coma-like condition, medically known as a ‘disorder of consciousness’. In the past it was highly unusual for such individuals to survive very long after the initial trauma that caused their injury. However, the emergence of modern medi...

This booklet is for family and friends of anyone in a ‘vegetative’ state (with no awareness) or ‘minimally conscious’ state (with minimal and intermittent awareness of themselves and their environment).It is designed to help clarify the law and practice in England and Wales1 around decision-making in relation to a patient who lacks capacity to make...

This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references ar...

This article examines connections between communication and identity. We present an analysis of actual, recorded social interactions in order to describe intersections between identity and vocabulary selection. We focus on how, in selecting or deselecting particular terms (e.g., cephalic, doula, cooker) speakers can display both their own identitie...

One of the most pressing concerns for many helpline staff is how to manage overt forms of distress and anxiety manifest in ‘troubles talk’, while also encouraging (or ‘empowering’) callers to take action to change the conditions that are creating the distress. Based on an audio-recording of a single call to a Home Birth helpline (drawn from a corpu...

This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references ar...

This article builds on and develops the emerging bioethics literature on the 'window of opportunity' for allowing death by withholding or withdrawing treatment. Our findings are drawn from in-depth interviews with 26 people (from 14 different families) with severely brain injured relatives. These interviews were specifically selected from a larger...

Gender and sexuality are routinely displayed, negotiated, and constructed through talk-in-interaction. The cumulative, empirically derived body of knowledge foundational to conversation analysis (CA) as a discipline is increasingly used in feminist (and other politically engaged) research as a way of engaging with gender and sexuality as part of th...

Introduction Self-Initiated and Other-Initiated Repair: The Distinction Self-Initiated Repair in Same-TCU Self-Initiated Repair Later than Same-TCU Other-Initiated Repair Future Directions

This article examines the ways in which speakers positively assess recipients—a generic practice of complimenting in talk-in-interaction—in the particular institutional context of a helpline for women seeking a home birth. It analyzes the positive assessments (n = 112) produced by a single call-taker across 80 helpline calls. It considers their des...

This article draws on naturally occurring talk-in-interaction to explore the use of unrepaired indexicals—specifically he, she, and they—to refer to third persons when there is no prior full-form reference. We show some of the local resources that participants use to understand the referent but focus predominantly on how locally initial indexicals...

Social scientists and linguists have sometimes written about ‘men's talk’ (Coates, 2003), ‘women's talk’ (Coates, 1996), ‘lesbians’ talk' (Morgan & Wood, 1995) or ‘gay men's talk’ (Leap, 1996) as though the fact that the speakers whose talk is being analysed are men, or women, or gay is sufficient warrant for analysing their talk as such. But, as S...

Pregnancy, childbirth and the post-partum period can be times of significant stress, anxiety, depression or trauma. In addition to the bodily changes involved in bearing and delivering a child and the social changes that motherhood brings, the challenges of navigating through the institutional politics of maternity care and seeking to make informed...

With the construction of women's genitals as problematic, thèprivate' female body becomes a site for potential improvement. Socio-cultural accounts of vaginal size in the West construct a tight (but not too tight) vagina as desirable, and àloose' vagina as undesirable. The impor-tance of size is evident in contexts as diverse as slang, comedy, and...

The summary care record was marketed to the public as a way for accident and emergency staff to check up on unconscious patients.1 The most important information I would want staff to have is that contained in my advance directive, drawn …

http://orca.cf.ac.uk/id/eprint/17530

This paper analyses the way in which a particular newspaper report constructs ‘public opinion’ based on data from small-scale qualitative research. Using as a case study a report of a focus group discussion of Clinton's grand jury testimony, we show how these data are ‘worked up’ as representative, generalisable, and valid. By capitalising on the a...

This paper responds to Maria Wowk’s (Human Studies, 30, 131–155, 2007) critique of “Kitzinger’s feminist conversation analysis”, corrects her misrepresentation of it, and rebuts her claim to have cast doubt on whether it is “genuinely identifiable” as conversation analysis (CA). More broadly, it uses Wowk’s critique as a springboard for continuing...

This chapter contains section titled:

Jane Sunderland, Language and gender: An advanced resource book. London & New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xxiv, 359. Hb $110 Pb $33.95. This is a textbook designed for use by those studying, researching, and teaching in the field of gender and language. Although it is written from the perspective of linguistics, it is also accessible to people in ot...

Conversation analysis – the study of talk-in-interaction – is proving a valuable tool for politically engaged inquiry and social critique. This article illustrates the use of conversation analysis in feminist and critical research, drawing on a range of empirical studies. After introducing conversation analysis – its theoretical assumptions, method...

This paper critically examines the construction and definition of sexual harassment — both in policy documents and in everyday life experiences — in order to consider why it is often invisible in the workplace. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, it explores, in particular, the ways in which accounts of experiences of sexual harassment effec...

In this introduction to the special issue of Discourse Studies on `Referring to Self and Others in Conversation' we briefly survey the history of conversation analytic work on reference to persons from Sacks and Schegloff's (1979) pioneering seven-page paper to the most recently published work. We then introduce the contributions to the special iss...

Speakers of English have available a set of terms dedicated to doing individual self-reference: `I' and its grammatical variants, `me', `my', `mine', etc. Speaker selection of other than these dedicated terms may invite special attention for what has prompted their use. This article draws on field recordings of talk-in-interaction in which speakers...

Building on Hochschild's path-breaking analysis of service providers' `emotional labour', this article demonstrates some of the interactional skills required for emotional labour to be performed. Using conversation analysis (CA), we examine a single case from a database of recorded beauty salon interactions. The episode was chosen because it makes...

On some occasions of self-reference there can be two equally viable forms available to speakers: individual self-reference (e.g. `I') and collective self-reference (e.g. `we'). This means that selection of one or the other in talk-in-interaction can — akin to the selection of terms for reference to non-present persons — be guided by such considerat...

The rate of home births in the UK is very low (around 2%) and many women who would like to give birth at home find it impossible to get midwifery cover or are advised of medical contraindications. The Home Birth Helpline offers support and expertise for women in this situation. Based on the analysis of 80 recorded calls, this article uses conversat...

Research on emotional labour in the workplace — including beauty salons — has relied on workers' reports of emotional labour; few researchers have examined workers' moment-by-moment workday experience to explicate the practices of emotional labour in action. Using conversation analysis (CA) of a single interaction between a client and a beauty ther...

Recent legal developments in the UK have reasserted the traditional nuclear family as the normative model and defined marriage as between one man and one woman. This article uses conversation analysis (CA) to analyse naturally occurring telephone conversations in the course of which lesbians, gay men and their heterosexual advocates negotiate the t...

This article uses conversation analysis (CA) on a single case study (a call to a helpline for women with symphysis pubis dysfunction) to explore how, and why, a speaker produces a non-present third person she has earlier referred to using a non-gendered term (`your partner') as a member of a gendered category (`a bloke') — and why she later seeks t...

The skills of talking with women who have had unhappy birth experiences rarely find a place in midwifery education. Nor is it apparent from the literature just what these skills are, or how they can be implemented in the moment-by-moment unfolding of an interaction. Yet this is a vital part of any relationship that offers continuous support to wome...

Drawing on a corpus of 80 calls to a Home Birth helpline, we use conversation analysis to analyze how callers and call takers display to one another that they are talking for a second or subsequent time. We focus in particular on the role of memory in these interactions. We show how caller and call taker are oriented to remembering at the beginning...

The use of categorical person reference terms such as 'woman' , 'gentleman' , 'lady' , etc. (sometimes referred to as 'membership categorisation devices') has seemed to offer a solution to the problem of when gender is relevant in talk, since it is widely taken for granted that a speaker who refers to herself (or another) as – for example – a 'woma...

This chapter explores the use of conversation analysis in studying gender and sexuality from a feminist perspective. We are both long-time feminist researchers and activists (see, for example, Kitzinger, 1987, 2004; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 2004; Wilkinson 1986, 2007; Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1993). Feminism means developing an understanding of oppress...

The expression of surprise-at something unexpected-is a key form of emotional display. Focusing on displays of surprise performed by means of reaction tokens (akin to Goffman's "response cries"), such as wow, gosh, oh my god, ooh!, phew, we use an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic approach to analyze surprise in talk-in-interaction. Our ke...

This article briefly considers the convergence and divergence between Discursive Psychology (DP) and Conversation Analysis (CA), in relation to cognition in talk-in-interaction. It explores the possibilities for research that begins from, rather than argues for, a post-cognitive perspective. Drawing in particular on an analysis of a single fragment...

In the UK a woman has the right to decide to give birth at home, irrespective of whether she is expecting her first or a subsequent child and of any perceived 'risk' factors. However, the rate of home births in the UK is very low (around 2%), varies widely across the country and many women do not know how to arrange midwifery cover. The Home Birth...

Heterosexism has become a recognized social problem since the rise of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) activism in the 1970s. One of its manifestations is heteronormativity: the mundane production of heterosexuality as the normal, natural, taken-for-granted sexuality. My research uses conversation analysis to explore heteronormativi...

In this article, we explore lesbian lives "beyond the closet" (Seidman, Meeks, & Traschen, 2002) through an empirical analysis of conversational data in which lesbian speakers make their sexual identities apparent. We analyze when and how lesbian identities become interactionally relevant and in particular, the ways in which lesbian speakers challe...

This article focuses on the ways in which heterosexuality is routinely deployed as a taken-for-granted resource in ordinary interactions. Using the foundational data sets of conversation analysis (CA), this article analyzes the conversational practices through which cointeractants, in the course of accomplishing other activities, routinely produce...

The notion that children (especially boys) need male role models has been used in the past to attack lesbian parents in custody cases, and more recently in debates about donor insemination, adoption and fostering. We are interested in how lesbian parents and their supporters respond to arguments about the necessity of male role models. We analyse d...