Search

Sending help when needed is a central role for emergency service call takers, but providing help during the call is also an important part of the job. The "care work" call takers do may assist callers with physical and emotional safety and enhance their resilience as they deal with ongoing emergencies prior to the arrival of the police. This conversational analytic study of a collection of 24 emergency telephone calls reveals the interactional techniques the call takers use to accomplish care work and shows how they integrate care work into their communication within the call. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses conversation analysis to investigate how participants in emergency telephone calls in the United States use racial/ethnic categories to describe persons of interest such as suspects, victims, or persons needing assistance. It problematizes the use of racial/ethnic categories in these calls by first analyzing an instance of a caller's racial profiling (in which racial categories are used to justify the call). This instance of racial profiling is then compared with 15 routine emergency service calls to reveal how callers and call takers routinely introduced racial/ethnic categories. I describe how both deviant and routine uses of these categories could lead to racial profiling and/or displace information that might be more effective in creating useful descriptions of persons of interest. The conclusion addresses ideas for further research and practical implications for emergency telephone call takers and those working to transform the way race is tied to policing in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates interactional challenges experienced in calls to emergency services with native English speaking (NS) call takers and non-native speaking (NNS) callers. Case studies of three problematic NNS/NS calls from a collection of emergency service calls were conducted using a conversation analytic approach. These calls were selected from publicly available recordings which were made by callers who were hearably NNS of English. The analysis shows how accents, grammatical and other linguistic choices led to related challenges in the pragmatics of communication (including procedures for sequential organization such as adjacency pairs, repair initiation, confirmation requests, presequences and story solicits). Routine procedures for repair or confirmation can produce hidden disjunctures and/or inaccurate or missing information as a result of the NNS/NS issues in the interaction. These challenges may contribute to failures of intersubjective understanding in the calls, affect the accuracy of information obtained, and extend the length of the call, which may impact the successful provision of emergency services to NNS callers. • Emergency phone calls from non-native speakers may have misunderstandings. • Call takers struggled with non-native speakers' accents, grammar, and word choice. • Non-native speakers' performance of pragmatics challenged by language limitations. • Call takers repair moves may be stymied by caller's language limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]