Charles Antaki

• Loughborough University

When people alleging sexual assault are interviewed by police, their accounts are tested to see if they would stand up in court. Some tests are in the form of tendentious questions carrying implications (e.g., that the sex was consensual) damaging to the complainant's allegation. In a qualitative analysis of 19 English police interviews with people...

This article has been published in, Discourse Analysis Online, available at: http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/v1/n1/a1/antaki2002002-t.html. A number of ways of treating talk and textual data are identified which fall short of discourse analysis. They are: (1) under-analysis through summary; (2) under-analysis through taking sides; (3) under-anal...

A listener can offer an interpretation (can give a 'candidate understanding') of what a speaker is currently saying. I distinguish between, on the one hand, proposing a candidate understanding that solves a manifest problem by offering new, relevant information; and, on the other hand, proposing a candidate understanding that does not seem to relat...

Abstract Standard test questions allow the questioner to confirm an answer as correct, displaying their greater epistemic authority over the answerer (as in the canonical case of the classroom, where the teacher knows more than the pupil). But the instructional power of test questions may prompt their use even when that asymmetry is neutralised or...

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 virtuall...

This chapter is about some of the ways in which adults with intellectual disabilities (such as, e.g. those with Down syndrome) communicate with those around them — most specifically, with staff who are charged with supporting them. Such staff help service users live independently, by overseeing their day-to-day household activities, arranging trave...

In a qualitative study of 50 hours of videotapes of interactions between staff and adults with intellectual disabilities, in two different service environments, we identified conversational practices that arguably promoted – or failed to promote – a discourse of service-users’ personal agency in how they carried out everyday activities. Staff could...

Reporting sexual assault to the authorities is fraught with difficulties, and these are compounded when the complainant is hindered by an intellectual disability (ID). In a study of 19 U.K. police interviews with complainants with ID alleging sexual assault and rape, we found that most interviewing officers on occasion pursued lines of questioning...

When police officers interview people with intellectual disabilities who allege sexual assault and rape, they must establish rapport with the interviewee but deal with their distress in a way that does not compromise the interview’s impartiality and its acceptability in court. Inspection of 19 videotaped interviews from an English police force’s re...

In recent years, British social psychologists have witnessed a new challenge to mainstream approaches to their discipline based on post-structuralist views of language. Although approaches differ in important respects, these 'new' perspectives share a concern to shift the focus of social psychological attention away from a referential model of lang...

In a corpus of c. 250 h of recorded interactions between young children and adults in USA and UK households, we found that children could be directed to change their course of action by three syntactic formats that offered alternatives: an imperative, or a modal declarative, plus a consequential alternative to non-compliance (e.g. come down at once...

Mental-health practitioners, assessing children for possible psychiatric conditions, need to probe sensitive matters. We examine practitioners' use of questions which try to clarify a given issue by offering alternative descriptions of how things are: one bland, and the other clearly undesirable in some way. The undesirable states of affairs can be...

1. Crespo accede a la racionalidad por medio de un análisis del divorcio entre actitudes y contexto social en los teóricos de las 'actitudes. 2. Racionalidad es lo que hace que las acciones de una persona (incluyendo su hablar) pasen una prueba de significación social, tanto a sí mismos como a los demás. Esta prueba està necesariamente cargada de...

Unlike standard survey- or interview-based social science research, Conversation Analysis reveals the exact interactional practices by which medical personnel carry out their duties. This gives the results of CA research enviable face validity, and enough detail to indicate specific interventions for change. I outline some of the promises and poten...

In a critique of Conversation Analysis' treatment of context, Waring, Creider, Tarpey and Black invite us to see that, when understanding some stretch of interaction, speakers' retrospective reports might be helpful. Two standard responses to Waring et al.'s argument are that 1) people's personal accounts of contingent and fleeting moments of inter...

People with intellectual disability can be supported by staff encouraging their skills in communication and in physical tasks. In a qualitative study, I used video evidence from a residential home and from 2 garden therapy services to argue that physical tasks are structurally more likely to result in successful performance (and corresponding posit...

Background Staff can encourage adults with intellectual disabilities to reflect on their experiences in a number of ways. Not all are equally successful interactionally. Methods Conversation Analysis is used to examine c. 30 h of recordings made at two service-provider agencies. Results I identify two practices for soliciting reflection: both start...

How do support staff resolve the interactional dilemma of getting their clients to do things, while respecting their independence? In a corpus of over 200 everyday requests made by residential home staff to adults with an intellectual impairment, the staff tended to use formats which claimed high entitlement to be obeyed, and made little acknowledg...

The authors explain the attractions of applying discursive psychology (DP) and conversation analysis (CA) by reporting three different examples of their engagement with practitioners and clients. Along the way, a case is made for separating DP/CA from other kinds of qualitative analysis in social psychology, and for deconstructing some commonly hel...

The ideas that mark modern-day pragmatics are old, but did not start to get more systematically developed until the 1960s and 1970s. Still, the very recognition of pragmatics as a self-standing academic discipline is a product of the 1980s, not least made possible by the establishment of the International Pragmatics Association. One scholar in part...

When support staff use questions to instruct, advise or guide adults with intellectual disabilities (ID), or to solicit information from them, the interaction does not always proceed smoothly, particularly when replies are ambiguous, absent or not obviously relevant. That can lead to interactional trouble and dissatisfaction, or worse. We report on...

What happens if one treats social identity as a flexible resource in conversational interaction? Close attention to the sequencing of talk suggests that speakers' identities are much more subtle than simple pre-given category labels suggest, and that they change rapidly as a function of the ephemeral (but socially consequential) demands of the situ...

This paper argues that explanations do various things, and that the analyst would do well to look to the explainers themselves, and their audience, to identify just what those things are. As an illustration of the general principle, the paper describes explanations that need to be understood as arising from speakers' construction of each other as b...

‘Because …’ statements in 40 unobtrusively recorded conversations between middle-class speakers were examined. Other people's single actions - attribution theory's paradigm case for explanation - were not frequently brought up for explanation. Events speakers brought up for explanation were, in order of frequency: general states of the world, event...

Intergroup theory and attribution theory were applied to 151 voters' perceptions of the causes of electors' intentions to vote for subjects' own preferred party and other parties. An intergroup extension of actor-observer attribution theory predicted that the difference in the explanations should be along the external-internal locus dimension, but...

Tufty Clubs are the main educational intervention made by road safety officers to educate primary school children in the dangers of pedestrian accidents. The effectiveness of Tufty Clubs was assessed by testing 186 5-year-old children on road safety knowledge both in the middle of their first school year and again at its end. Children from schools...

Public health debates in online forums allow the emergence of ordinary practical reasoning about 'official' health information. We used a Discursive Psychology approach to analyse postings in a forum devoted to the discussion of the H1N1 (Swine flu) virus. We identify the discursive practices that contributors use to valorize certain elements in th...

This chapter is about what happened when we talked to care-staff about their daily round of supporting people with learning disabilities. The idea was to share our (suitably de-jargonised) conversation-analytic observations with them, in the hope that they would reflect on their practices and, where they found them wanting, change them.

Conversation Analysis is the study of how social action is brought about through the close organisation of talk. It can be applied, but the term ‘Applied Conversation Analysis’ has various shades of meaning. The two most familiar are that the application of Conversation Analysis (CA) to the talk of an institution like the school or the medical clin...

Based on an inspection of sessions with intellectually impaired and non-impaired clients, five conversational practices are identified by which a cognitive behaviour psychotherapist may keep the session 'on-track' in the face of possible deviation. Close inspection of audio- and video-recordings reveals a gradient of therapist responses. They range...

We note interviewers' use, after an answer receipt, of markedly positive assessments (such as "brilliant," "excellent," etc.). They occur in a (permissive) sequence of [answer receipt] + [right/ok token] + [high-grade assessment] + [move to next item] which, we argue, are task-oriented, rather than content-oriented, devices. They signal movement th...

Official policy talk of “choice” for people with intellectual impairments tends toward fundamental life choices (e.g., who to marry, what job to work at) at the expense of the minor but more frequent concerns of daily living (when to wash, what to eat, where to go in the evening). Statutes and mission statements are unspecific about how any such ch...

How does a newly diagnosed user get inducted into a forum dedicated to people suffering from bipolar disorder? Is their opening message “matched” by the forum's reply? We add to the literature on social support online by using conversation analysis (CA) to explore an apparent contradiction between a new user's first post and forum members' replies...

What does it mean to be ‘intellectually impaired’? At one level the answer is quite clear: there are official criteria for the term, enshrined in psychological and psychiatric classification schemes, and given weight in the provision of education, health and social services. Give the individual a battery of tests (of memory, verbal fluency, compreh...

Accessible summary• Staff often influence people with learning disabilities when they talk to them and when they answer them.• For example, they might talk too quickly or they might use sentences that are too difficult. They might also miss what a person with learning disabilities is trying to say.• We think residential services should make video r...

Psychotherapists want to find out how clients see things, and then, at some point, get them to see things differently. In ordinary talk there are lots of ways of offering someone an alternative to what they believe. This chapter concentrates on one way – on how one person might formulate another's words. I am using the term “formulate” here as it h...

Background At the level of policy recommendation, it is agreed that people with intellectual impairments ought to be given opportunities to make choices in their lives; indeed, in the UK, the Mental Capacity Act of 2005 enshrines such a right in law. However, at the level of practice, there is a dearth of evidence as to how choices are actually off...

This article was published in the journal, Disability & Society [© Taylor & Francis]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687590802038860 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 re...

Games between staff and people with intellectual disabilities serve to promote social engagement and inclusion. However, when the person has limited and idiosyncratic communicative abilities, it may be hard to gauge what his/her own view of the matter is. We examine video-taped records of two episodes in which a staff member of a group home prompte...

To deal with some current debates about the analytic validity of ‘contextual’ details in the analysis of talk-in-interaction, we (Alec McHoul and Mark Rapley) work through two cases. The first is hypothetical and derives from the current literature in speech-act-theory-inspired pragmatics (Capone, 2005). The second is actual and arises from our ini...

To deal with some current debates about the analytic validity of ‘contextual’ details in the analysis of talk-in-interaction, we (Alec McHoul and Mark Rapley) work through two cases. The first is hypothetical and derives from the current literature in speech-act-theory-inspired pragmatics (Capone, 2005). The second is actual and arises from our ini...

This article explores one aspect of scholarly work as a situated practice: the way that, in a conversation analysis group data session, scholars juggle their technical talk with personal value judgments ostensibly inappropriate to the practices of this particular branch of the social sciences. We see how value judgments are handled, and what visibl...

People with severe communication difficulties may attempt to exercise control over their lives by verbally or non-verbally refusing an activity proposed by supporters. We detail examples in which such refusals are treated by care home staff as a temporary reluctance, warranting further attempts to persuade the individual to co-operate. We identify...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines modern psychotherapy as "the treatment of disorders of the mind or personality by psychological or psychophysiological methods." The common assumption is that, in psychotherapies, the means of healing is talk. Not all talk is therapeutic, and the history of psychotherapy involves not just formulating new psych...

The aim of this chapter is to present a systematic overview of some of the research results presented in this book. An overview like this cannot cover all that was important in the preceding chapters, but it will bring out something from each. We present the key results in Table 11.1. We then unpack the contents of the table, and, by setting them a...

This is a chapter from the book, The SAGE Handbook of Social Research Methods. "Discourse" means what people say or write. Scholars might want to look into what people say or write for many reasons: and their particular reason will play a large part in deciding just what sort of saying and writing they choose to study, and what methods they use to...

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...

Gestures unaccompanied by sound risk not being registered by their intended recipient. We chart examples of this in a video recording of a meeting between people with intellectual disabilities and support staff. The recordings reveal that individuals with limited spoken language can, and do, design nonvocal gestures to make intelligible contributio...

This article was published in the journal, Discourse & Society [© SAGE Publications]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926507075473 In residential homes for people with learning or intellectual disabilities (or mental retardation, in North American usage), a routine way for staff members to structure residents'...

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 re...

This article is about how some British mental-health professionals use idiomatic expressions (like ‘for all the world’, ‘at the end of the day’, ‘once in a blue moon’ and so on) in their dealings with clients. I found that the practitioner sometimes directly or indirectly attributed these expressions to the client. In each case the practitioner was...

Discursive psychology's interests in respecifying the traditional phenomena of psychology is well exemplified, we think, in the way that conversation analysis (which is a mainstay of discursive psychology) can illuminate psychotherapy. This chapter is about two things: what conversation analysis has to say about psychotherapy as an interaction, and...

Service-user groups whose goals include the promotion of self-advocacy for people with an intellectual disability aim, among other things, to encourage service users to identify problems and find solutions. However, service users' contributions to group sessions may not always be full and spontaneous. This presents a dilemma to the facilitator. In...

This study examined power dynamics in verbal interactions between care staff and people with learning disabilities. Recordings of residents' meetings in a group home for people with learning disabilities were examined. The analysis showed some of the ways in which power was exercised in verbal interactions between care staff and residents. It was f...

Many professional assessment devices (questionnaires, interview schedules and so on) are designed to harvest informants’ cognitions as stable, internally-represented, information-processed conceptions of the world. If one dissents from this notion of what beliefs, knowledge and opinions are, then one is freer to see how they are produced, in intera...

Psychotherapists sometimes disclose personal information to their clients during therapeutic sessions. We report here our analysis of how these 'therapist self-disclosures' are done. In a sample of 15 sessions involving four therapists, we find that all therapists use them sparingly and some not at all. When they do, they 'match' something in the c...

This article is restricted access. The definitive version is available at: http://dis.sagepub.com/ Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the client’s talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the client’s circumstances. But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer inter...

The recent application of Conversation Analysis (CA) to online forum communication has been successful in explicating the sequential ties among messages. In this article, we build on those foundations and show how CA’s illumination of the structural resources of interaction can provide an analysis of accountable action in an online forum setting. W...

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the de...

The psychological model known as Theory of Mind (ToM) claims that people get along by reading others’ minds, and that one can test how good they are at it by asking them to report on what they themselves, and others, believe or think. This article rehearses objections to both of those propositions. The fundamental objection is that ‘mind-reading’,...

Having a 'theory of mind' (ToM) means that one appreciates one's own and others' mental states, and that this appreciation guides interactions with others. It has been proposed that ToM is impaired in schizophrenia and experimental studies show that patients with schizophrenia have problems with ToM, particularly during acute episodes. The model pr...

This chapter is about how interviewees go about using absurdity in their expressions of their own views and their descriptions of others’. Expressing one’s own views absurdly gets them registered, yet protected against the potential accusation that one “really meant it.” It is a way of doing what the discursive psychologists Edwards and Potter call...

A number of ways of treating talk and textual data are identified which fall short of discourse analysis. They are: (1) under-analysis through summary; (2) under-analysis through taking sides; (3) under-analysis through over-quotation or through isolated quotation; (4) the circular identification of discourses and mental constructs; (5) false surve...

A number of ways of treating talk and textual data are identified which fall short of discourse analysis. They are: (1) under-analysis through summary; (2) under-analysis through taking sides; (3) under-analysis through over-quotation or through isolated quotation; (4) the circular identification of discourses and mental constructs; (5) false surve...

In interviews, it may happen that a respondent gives an answer which seems well formatted, but is not receipted as acceptable by the interviewer. In this article I examine one way in which interviewers display their diagnosis of the problem and act to bring about its solution. In the cases I describe, the interviewers defer revision of the question...

This is restricted access. This article was published in the journal, Disability and society [© Taylor and Francis] and is available online at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09687599.asp What can happen when care staff interview clients with a learning disability? We examine tape-recordings of five questionnaire-based interviews designed t...

Do high-grade assessments (such as “lovely” and “brilliant”) have a use in marking episodes in mundane conversation? Inspection suggests that closing sequences in telephone conversations, when they include such embedded actions as making arrangements, have a slot which can be filled by a turn-initial high-grade assessment. I suggest that the high-g...

Peter Robinson’s abiding interests in language, the categorization of persons, and the use and abuse of truth motivate this study of interviewer practice. Using data from a psychological assessment interview, the author makes the argument that when interviewers edit scripts, they do so in ways that make plain their understandings of their responden...

Members of parliamentary institutions have a special feature of their discourse community open to them in argumentationÐ the use of the public record as an authority for others' exact words. We show how members of the British House of Commons use the ocial record explicitly to recruit their political opponents' words to promote their own projects....

My comments take for granted the integrity and seriousness of the authors whose work is being reviewed, and nothing in the critical tone of my remarks has anything to do with their professionalism or good faith. Far from it; no reader can mistake the painstaking effort of Markman and Tetlock's (2000) work, and it is a four-square example of the soc...

The central point of this article is to show how identity ascription can work to do a very specific job-to be a "disqualifier." It can disqualify a listener's apparent claims on a story one is telling, or a version of events one is offering. If the story recipient or version recipient discharges his or her obligations as a listener inappropriately,...

To be psychometrically valid, standard questions are meant to be delivered as they appear on the interview schedule—or by nonleading paraphrase—and the respondents’ answers exactly recorded. Yet, inspection of a set of transcripts of quality-of-life assessments of people with a learning disability (in North American terminology, mental retardation)...

This is restricted access. This article was published in the journal, Discourse studies [© Sage] and is available at: http://dis.sagepub.com/content/vol1/issue1/ Making a show of conceding by using a three-part structure of proposition, concession and reassertion has the effect – in contrast to other ways of conceding – of strengthening one’s own p...

There seems to be a professional (and perhaps societal) consensus that the identity label of 'intellectual disabled' is an aversive, even 'toxic' one. Indeed, Todd & Shearn (1995, 1997) have advanced the suggestion that parents' concerns over the toxicity of the label led them to bring up their children in ignorance of their disabilities, and thus...

We examine whether a ränge of devices, previously found to privilege the knowledge and interests ofone Speaker at the expense of another, turn up in the talk of a researcher conducting an open-ended, 'view-soliciting' interview, where the Interviewer is supposed to defer to the interviewee. We show that these devices do appear, and that they can ha...

Avowing a 'paranormal' experience might jeopardize a speaker's rational status. We compared such tellings with two sorts of non-paranormal events. One sample was a set of solicited, interview accounts and the other was a set of stories told in the run of spontaneous conversations. In general the results confirmed that paranormal tales did attract t...

Quality of life (QOL) has become a topic of much debate in the learning difficulties literature. Increasing use is made of questionnaire-driven interview schedules in an effort to find out what clients believe in their own words. However, in this paper, the authors argue that the use made of such questionnaires may actually distort interviewees' 'o...

We describe how participants in an interaction use completions of each others' talk to bind themselves to a collective formulation of a matter in hand. In a corpus of problem-oriented discussions among groups of two or three people, we find speakers using sequences of completable utterance — putative completion — ratification to put their formulati...

Contrary to received wisdom, ‘acquiescence bias’ in the responses of people with learning disabilities to questioning is not a simple phenomenon, and certainly not one to be laid at the door solely of people with learning disabilities themselves. Rather, it is probably an artefact of the conversational organization of interviews as tests. Analysis...

The new discourse of `quality of life' is highly consequential for those whose lives are regulated by medical and psychological services, but at the heart of it there is a paradox. On the one hand, psychologists are committed to assessing the wellbeing of their clients; on the other hand, their theorization of `quality of life' and their diagnostic...

In a rapprochement between two rather different domains of pragmatics, we apply Goffman's notion of ‘footing’ to what happens when one speaker completes another speaker's utterance. Participants manage this in three-part sequences, in the third turn of which the original speaker accepts or rejects not merely the propositional content of the putativ...

Potter (1996) makes many interesting comments on our paper. Unfortunately we cannot address them all in detail and we therefore focus on four points which we consider focal and of interest to the readers. According to Potter, we are too swift in our dismissal of the treatment of footing in discourse-analytic work; we hold a naively realist account...

Recent moves in psychology to use people's talk as data have been highly productive, but we should look carefully at the way the context of such talk is reproduced when the research is published. It can easily be shown how context is stripped out of reports of experiments and questionnaire studies, but we argue that even discursive analyses risk sy...

En un artículo titulado «Anál-isis del Discurso» (en adelante AD), lo primero que habría que hacer sería una llamada de aten-ción: no existe una definición única de AD que pueda contener toda la variedad de teorías y prácticas que actualmente se acogen bajo esta denominación. No obstante, es gracias a la variedad de prácticas de AD que contamos con...

Argues that attribution theory constructed its own version of F. Heider's (1958) starting position and that the limitations of this construction are only now becoming apparent. The linguistic turn prevalent elsewhere in the social sciences is now showing up the weaknesses in attribution theory's conception of people as explainers, and offers a new...

We examine the proposition that, in ordinary conversation, people are concerned to argue — to justify their claims and to counter potential and actual counter claims. We test out the proposition by analysing explanations in one particular conversation. We attend to the validity claims of what the speakers say, and to the authority with which they s...

Two antagonistic Spanish discourses on abortion were examined for the use of explanatory genres. The material consisted of information published by a pro-abortion group (Commisió pel Dret a L'Avortament) and an antiabortion group (Pro-Vida). The two discourses made different use of different explanatory genres (causal attribution; reason-giving; ba...

How do explanations appear in conversation? We distinguish claimbacking from more familiar social psychology genres of ordinary explanation (causal attribution, reason-giving, excuse and justification). Claim-backing is the use of explanations to warrant the truth of what one has said, or the way one has said it. The way that people back claims rev...