Search

Psychiatrists, like other medical professionals with a diagnosing or prescribing role, control access to a range of forms of treatment, medication and service that their patient, or their patient's carer, may want access to. In this article, we explore psychiatrist-patient interactions in the distinctive institutional site of a UK NHS Gender Identity Clinic, where the psychiatrist's gatekeeping role is renowned. We focus on some interactional features of the psychiatrist's gatekeeping role as it gets played out and oriented to in a specific class of question that they ask their patients. This class of questions involves the psychiatrist Putting to the patient a possible future hypothetical scenario where the patient's treatment is withdrawn. We show how these hypothetical questions function in the psychiatric assessment of transsexuals, and how the psychiatrist's institutional, gatekeeping role is made manifest both in the design of the hypothetical question and in the response that is elicited from the patient. We end by considering the extent to which hypothetical questions may be deemed a ‘useful’ or a ‘successful’ strategy in the psychiatric assessment of transsexual patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the findings of mainstream social scientific research on the context of research projects. Classification of the data collection techniques; Source of the erroneous result of a research instrument; Emphasis of the action orientation of talk in discursive or conversation analytic approaches.

Responds to comments on the different distinctions of related perspectives in debates. Differences of the strategies to overcome problems; Distinction of natural from contrived data; Reiteration of argument to avoid the study of interactions.

This article criticizes current psychological work on 'heterosexism', highlighting the way its operationalization tends to obscure flexible discursive practices and settle them into stable, causal attitudes within individuals. It studies extracts from a variety of sources where sexuality is made relevant (in describing someone as a 'poof ' or a 'dyke', for example), and considers (a) how interactants attend to 'heterosexism' in their talk and (b) what such 'attending to' is doing interactionally. The analysis highlights four of the resources speakers use to manage such talk: (i) discounting heterosexism; (ii) displaying a lack of understanding; (iii) softening the blow; and (iv) conceding positive features. It is argued that heterosexist utterances do not have their negativity built into them, but become prejudicial, troublesome or otherwise for participants in situ, as their sense is produced and negotiated. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of this type of research for psychological approaches to (what are typically conceived as) 'ideological' or 'cognitive' phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]