Search

In this editorial, we introduce the special issue entitled, ‘Language and psychosocial oppression: Methodological approaches, challenges, and opportunities’. This special issue includes seven articles that were produced in relation to the growing attention being given to the psychological phenomena associated with (in)justice and (in)equity, with a particular focus on how justice-oriented agendas and interventions might be advanced. Specifically, the included articles point to ways in which more micro-oriented approaches to studying languaging practices might serve to analytically and theoretically foreground justice-oriented research aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child mental health assessments are complex and involve the analysis of data from multiple sources to inform treatment decisions. Question sequences are central to mental health assessments; however, little research has examined the functions of questions in child mental health interactions, particularly questions that aim to elicit information from children that might be used to inform diagnosis and treatment. In this study, we utilize a large corpus of video-recorded child mental health assessments to examine the use and function of a particular kind of wh-question—circular questions—that is, questions that seek clients' views on other family members' feelings, actions, and thoughts. Using conversation analysis, we identified three "broad" functions of circular questions in child mental health assessment. Our findings provide clinicians with clinically relevant examples for using circular questions to more fully involve children in the assessment process and acquire valuable information for diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To examine questioning practices in racially discordant interactions and describe how these practices engendered child-centered care. We used applied conversation analysis to analyze a collection of 300 questions directed to children across 10 cases involving children of color and their families in disease reevaluation appointments in pediatric oncology. Our analysis generated two patterns: 1) both the pediatric oncologists' and caregivers built upon one another's talk to enable the child's conversational turn, and 2) the oncologists' reformulated requests as questions to invite the child's permission and cooperation for completing exams and understanding symptoms. Children, pediatric oncologists, and caregivers coordinated their actions to enable children to participate as recipients of and respondents to questions. The analysis of real-time interactions illuminates practices for centering children in clinical encounters and the benefits of doing so. This study's findings have implications for defining competencies and practices for fostering child-centered communication, creating training materials based on real-time encounters, and identifying strategies for humanizing pediatric patient experiences. • The practice and benefits of child-centered care are poorly understood. • Research with children of color can inform the practice of child-centered care. • Pediatric oncologists use questions to invite children's participation in care. • Oncologists and families work together to enable children's participation in care. • Questioning practices are an important part of humanizing, child-centered care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates regarding quality in qualitative research are longstanding. There are continued calls for additional quality indicators that account for the heterogeneity of qualitative methodologies. In this introduction to the special issue, we take up the idea that quality criteria are often specific to a given methodological approach. Thus, included within this special issue, and overviewed in this introductory paper, are seven articles that outline the quality criteria related to specific qualitative methodologies, including grounded theory, thematic analysis, narrative methodology, interpretative phenomenological analysis, video-reflexive ethnography, discursive psychology, and conversation analysis and interpersonal process recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinction has been drawn between basic (pure) conversation analysis (CA) and applied CA. Applied CA has become especially beneficial for informing areas of practice such as health, social care and education, and is an accepted form of research evidence in the scientific rhetoric. There are different ways of undertaking applied CA, with different foci and goals. In this article, we articulate one way of conducting applied CA, that is especially pertinent for practitioners working in different fields. We conceptualise this as Reflective Interventionist CA (RICA). We argue that this approach to applied CA is important because of its emphasis on the reflective stance that is valuable to an understanding of research data, its commitment to collaboration with practitioners, and its inductive style. In this paper, we outline the core premises and benefits of this approach and offer empirical examples to support our argument. To conclude, we consider the implications for evidence-based practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In everyday conversations, people put forward versions of events and provide supporting evidence to build a credible case. In environments where there are potentially competing versions, case-building may take a more systematic format. Specifically, we conducted a rhetorical analysis to consider how in child mental health settings, families work to present a credible 'doctorable' reason for attendance. Data consisted of video-recordings of 28 families undergoing mental health assessments. Our findings point to eight rhetorical devices utilised in this environment to build a case. The devices functioned rhetorically to add credibility and authenticate the case being built, which was relevant as the only resource available to families claiming the presence of a mental health difficulty in the child was their spoken words. In other words, the 'problem' was something constructed through talk and therefore the kinds of resources used were seminal in decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applied Conversation Analysis (CA) is broadly accepted to be a qualitative methodological approach associated with the discursive turn. Although some argue for a distinct observational science paradigm, the current methodological dichotomy positions this work under the qualitative rubric. Applied CA focuses on the sequential design of social interaction, examining language and meaning within institutional settings. It emphasises informing practice and provides a useful form of evidence for therapists and counsellors, as the work is grounded in real‐world therapeutic practices. In therapy, language and talk are fundamental to the process and outcomes. Studying therapeutic social interaction through Applied CA can illuminate processes, improve practice, and utilise best practice to inform care. The focus of this article is our perspective on the value of Applied CA as a form of evidence in counselling and psychotherapy, and to encourage partnership working between academics and clinicians working in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Health Service (UK) offers initial screening appointments for children referred to child and adolescent mental health services to determine clinical need and assess risk. Conversation analysis was utilized on 28 video recordings of these assessments, lasting approximately 90 minutes each with a multidisciplinary team. This article focuses on the agenda setting strategies used to establish relevant goals with children and adolescents; specifically, the technique of offering ‘three wishes’. For example, ‘if you had three wishes, what would you like to make happen?’ In cases where children initially volunteered an assessment-relevant wish, they tended not to articulate further wishes. Non-assessment-relevant wishes (i.e. fantasy wishes, such as being ‘rich’) were treated as insufficient, with many approaches used to realign establishing assessment relevant goals. Where responses were not institutionally relevant, practitioners undertook considerable discursive work to realign the focus of the three wishes task to assessment relevance. In these cases, the wish responses were treated as irrelevant and tended to be dismissed, rather than explored for further detail. Such work with the children’s contributions has implications for engaging children and child-centred practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present discursive psychology (DP), a qualitative approach that focuses on the study of conversational and textual materials, including everyday interactions. Although DP is well-established methodologically and theoretically, and is used widely in Europe and in the Commonwealth countries, it is relatively unknown in counseling psychology in the United States. As such, the purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of DP and offer guidance for researchers who may be interested in studying and using DP. We thus discuss practical considerations for utilizing DP, including the development of research questions, carrying out data collection, and conducting DP-informed analyses. We also provide a general overview of the history of DP and key resources for those interested in studying it further, while noting the usefulness of DP for counseling psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integral to the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is the initial assessment through which the existence of a 'problem' is first ascertained. Despite this, there remains limited research on this early part of the diagnostic pathway. In this article, we utilised conversation analysis to examine relevant issues in relation to the practitioner-family interactions that take place within this initial assessment context. Our findings illustrated that parents typically first raised the possibility of the presence of an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis through 'building a case', which professionals were then able to ratify or negate. Furthermore, we found that the assessments unfolded sequentially and clinical decisions were typically reached through a distinctive pattern of interaction. These findings have important implications for clinical practice, including for the study of autism spectrum disorder assessments and diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic family therapy promotes a systemic reframing of individual problems to an understanding of the familial processes influencing family functioning. Parents often attend therapy identifying their child as the key problem, which raises issues of accountability and blame. In this article, we explored the discursive practices used by parents for constructing themselves as ‘good parents’. Using the basic principles of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, we analysed actual therapeutic sessions and found that parents used a range of strategies to display their good parenting. This included directly claiming to be a good parent, illustrating how they act in their child’s best interests, showing that they parent in appropriate ways and by making appeals to scientific rhetoric. It was concluded that family therapists have a challenging task in managing competing versions of events and we discussed implications for practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) has not been without controversy, with a pervasive sense of skepticism and resistance towards its adoption by many scholars. Language-based researchers in particular, such as conversation and discourse analysts, have been slow to embrace such tools for their work. In this paper we illustrate how we have used ATLAS.ti to support our own conversation and discourse analysis work, in order to demonstrate how such a tool can be leveraged to complete nine analytic tasks. Tasks and features we describe include, among others, transcribing and synchronizing transcripts with media files, engaging in unmotivated looking through creating quotations, and conducting a close, line by line analysis through writing memos. We illustrate how ATLAS.ti has allowed us to document our analytic decisions in a transparent, reflexive, rigorous and systematic way. We note, too, limitations of the software such as a lack of real-time collaboration support and challenges inherent to the analysis of video and online interactional data. Rather than taking control away from the researcher, we argue that ATLAS.ti enables the analyst to solve a range of methodological challenges, such as working with large data-sets and supporting deeper levels of analysis than is possible by hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The objective was to identify how children's knowledge positions were negotiated in child mental health assessments and how this was managed by the different parties.Methods: The child psychiatry data consisted of 28 video-recorded assessments. A conversation analysis was undertaken to examine the interactional detail between the children, parents, and practitioners.Results: The findings indicated that claims to knowledge were managed in three ways. First, practitioners positioned children as 'experts' on their own health and this was sometimes accepted. Second, some children resisted this epistemic position, claiming not to have the relevant knowledge. Third, some children's claims to knowledge were negotiated and sometimes contested by adult parties who questioned their competence to share relevant information about their lives in accordance with the assessment agenda.Conclusion: Through question design, the practitioner was able to position the child as holding relevant knowledge regarding their situation. The child was able to take up this position or resist it in various ways.Practice Implications: This has important implications for debates regarding children's competence to contribute to mental health interventions. Children are often treated as agents with limited knowledge, yet in the mental health assessment they are directly questioned about their own lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While researchers have used conversation analysis (CA) methods to understand online talk since the 1990s, to date there has been no systematic review of these studies to better understand this methodological development. This article presents a comprehensive literature review of 89 peer-reviewed journal articles reporting findings of empirical studies using CA to understand social interaction online. In this review, we describe who is conducting this type of research, the contexts in which CA has been used to make sense of text-based online talk, and where such studies are being published. We also identify the “fundamental” conversational structures researchers are drawing upon in making sense of online talk as social interaction. Findings show that studies are using CA to understand “mundane” conversational contexts, as well as institutional talk from educational, counseling and workplace settings. The number of such studies are increasing and are being conducted by an international network of researchers across a variety of disciplines. The data is most often described as synchronous or asynchronous, with a slow increase in attention to social media data. Publication outlets are mostly language-based and/methodological journals. Analysis revealed four main aims: (1) comparing online and face-to-face talk, (2) understanding how coherence is maintained, (3) understanding how participants deal with trouble, and (4) understanding how social actions are accomplished asynchronously. This review contributes to the overall understanding of the methodological development of CA, offering useful insights for those interested in using it to understand social interaction as it occurs online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the work of the MOOD (Microanalysis Of Online Data) network, an interdisciplinary association of academic researchers exploring ways of conducting close qualitative analyses of online interaction. Despite the fact that much online interaction meets the criteria for ‘conversation’, conversation analysis (CA) has only recently begun to grow and flourish as a methodology for analysing the overwhelming quantity of material that in many cases sits in archive form, visible to millions, on the Internet. We discuss the development of methods that are inherently suited for subjecting online interaction to the kind of rigorous analysis that conversation analysts have applied to talk of all kinds for several decades. We go on to explore the fundamental challenges that online data pose for CA, the value of many CA techniques for online analysis, and the possibilities of developing bespoke modes of analysis that are crafted for use with specific forms of online data (e.g. ‘tweets’ on Twitter ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some scholars have emphasized the culturally contingent nature of disabilities, far less research has attended to the situated and discursive contexts within which those with disabilities and their communities make relevant their own understandings and representations of disability. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, in this article we report findings generated from the analysis of audio and video data from therapy sessions and waiting room conversations among children with autism labels, their parents and therapists. We share a detailed analysis from one therapy session, using selected excerpts to illustrate the patterns noted across the corpus of data. We drew upon a discursive psychology framework informed by critical notions of disability, poststructural understandings of discourse, and certain aspects of conversation analysis to explore ways in which therapists reframed non-normative behaviors. We found that, rather than orienting to their work as “fixing” the child, therapists supported the child in making sense of how others (outsiders) might interpret their words and bodies. We illustrate how participants discursively worked to co-construct an account for how problematic behaviors may have been “misunderstood.” We argue that practitioners and others should consider ways in which they might reorient to and reinterpret children whose communication and behaviors fall outside of the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In education, decision making frequently involves ethically-imbued choices between two or more solutions to an educational 'problem.' Teacher education may utilize asynchronous discussions to prepare teachers to critically navigate this landscape. To understand how participants in an online English language (EL) teacher licensure program manage disagreements as they accomplish taking a stance over critical issues, this study uses a discourse analytic perspective influenced by conversation analysis to examine asynchronous discussions. Analysis illustrates how participants managed their epistemic stance while disagreeing by (1) taking stances that were often softened or hedged; (2) grounding their disagreements through particular discursive strategies including sharing personal experiences or posing rhetorical questions; and (3) making morally-imbued claims that were difficult to disagree with. Findings suggest that although topics may encourage participants to take sides on critical issues, personal stake in the moral matters raised may make it difficult for participants to shift their initial stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]