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This article focuses on the argumentative role of derisive laughter in broadcast political debates. Using Discursive Psychology (DP) we analyze how politicians use derisive laughter as an argumentative resource in multiparty interactions, in the form of debates about the U.K. and the European Union. Specifically, we explore how both pro- and anti-EU politicians use derisive laughter to manage issues of who-knows-what and who-knows-better. We demonstrate the uses of derisive laughter by focusing on 2 discrete, yet pervasive, interactional phenomena in our data—extended laughter sequences and snorts. We argue that in the context of political debates derisive laughter does more than signal trouble and communicate contempt; it is, more than often, mobilized in the service of ideological argumentation and used as a form of challenge to factual claims. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea in small boats has become a common sight in the media, particularly since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. The number of boats crossing the English Channel between the French and UK coasts has been increasing as other migration routes have been closed down. This article reports the findings of a discourse analysis of 96 UK newspaper articles published in December 2018 when the daily crossings were referred to as a “major crisis”. Adopting a broadly critical discursive psychology perspective, we identify the use of three main interpretative repertoires used within the media reporting. Firstly, a ‘secure the borders’ repertoire which positions the UK’s borders as porous and easily breached, secondly, a ‘smuggling is immoral’ repertoire which works to position smugglers as to blame for the current ‘crisis’ and removes responsibility for the crisis from the Government, and finally, a ‘desperate people’ repertoire which worked to position the refugees themselves as vulnerable and in need of protection, but also as people who will engage in risky behaviours. We suggest that the use of these repertoires ultimately functions to obscure the need for safe and legal migration routes to the UK.

Eating is situated within a context of politicized issues, such as environmental problems and health concerns; as a result, food talk is imbued with dilemmas. This study explores how twenty-sixunde...

Critical discursive psychology (CDP) was employed to examine how parents’ accounts of their young children’s participation in rugby league in New Zealand negotiate parental identities and, in parti...

Despite its prevalence, men's anxiety is arguably under-researched and poorly understood. The present study explores the reasoning provided by male posters to an online discussion forum about the source of their anxiety. Posts were collected from an Australian anxiety online discussion forum. This study utilises discursive psychology, informed by principles of membership categorisation analysis, to describe how age, occupation and family-related identities can be invoked within common sense reasoning about the source of male anxiety. References to various identity categories were routinely employed by male forum posters in their representations of themselves, in order to describe the source of their anxiety in terms of a contrast between how they are, and how they should be. In examining accounts of anxiety and responses to those accounts, we can trace cultural knowledge about issues regarding men, masculinity and anxiety that those accounts make relevant. Findings illustrate how men's descriptions of the source of their anxiety should be understood as culturally bound and related to expectations and obligations associated with their social context and category memberships. By enhancing understandings of how men describe the source of their anxiety, this study offers insight into improving the identification and engagement of men experiencing anxiety in health services.

This article utilises the concept of ‘race trouble’ as an overarching framework for examining an interview between Ms Vanessa Nakate and a South African news broadcaster. The interview describes an incident involving Ms Nakate’s attendance at a global climate change conference and her exclusion from a media report about a press briefing that she held along with four other youth activists at the conference. The analysis focuses on the collaborative and interactional production of Ms Nakate’s claim that her exclusion was racially motivated and the discursive mechanisms by which race is mobilised as a common-sense explanation for the incident that occurred. My analysis demonstrates the sanctionability of producing an accusation of racism and identifies the rhetorical functions of stake and facticity in its production, and concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these findings in the context of studies on race and racism in interaction.

This article explores how readers of UK newspapers construct expertise around climate change. It draws on 300 online readers’ comments on news items in The Guardian, Daily Mail and The Telegraph, concerning the release of the International Panel on Climate Change report calling for immediate action on climate change. Comments were analysed using discursive psychology. We identified a series of discursive strategies that commenters adopted to present themselves as experts in their commentary. The (mostly indirect) use of category entitlements (implicitly claiming themselves as expert) and the presentation of one’s argument as factual (based on direct or indirect technical knowledge or common sense) emerged as common ways in which readers made claims to expertise, both among the supporters and among the sceptics of climate change science. Our findings indicate that expertise is a fluid concept, constructed in diverse ways, with important implications for public engagement with climate change science.

The abstract proves the need for a comprehensive approach to psycholinguistic research of modern Ukrainian non-institutional military discourse. Formed by a combination of different types of discourses modern Ukrainian non-institutional military discourse needs a special methodological tool for its analysis. The success of the research task significantly depends on the correct choice of methods. The emphasis on the psychological features of the speaker, i.e. the inclusion of a wide range of factors: psychological, mental, pragmatic etc. in the linguistic personality analysis requires the combination of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific method of psychoanalysis and discursive psychology.

Swearing has been shown to affect hearers' perceptions of speakers. Existing studies show mixed effects. Some identify favourable perceptions, including: greater speaker informality, intensity, humour, and credibility. Others show negative outcomes, with swearers perceived as: less competent, intelligent, and trustworthy; and as more aggressive and socially inept than non-swearers. Most existing studies are based on experimental methodologies, typically using constructed data and directly eliciting evaluations. In this paper, using Discursive Psychology principles, I adopt a perspective that is closer to ‘real world’ processes of perception and evaluation. Specifically, I analyse online reader responses to news reports of a celebrity host's swearing during a televised awards event. Here, the data are unelicited, discursively formulated, and produced in response to a concrete swearing example. In the analysis, I examine the meaning frameworks through which the respondents evaluate swearing; and the types of perceptions that they form about the speaker, including his motivations for swearing and his personal characteristics. I demonstrate that: (a) evaluative categories are negotiated in different ways; and (b) evaluations are inextricably linked to existing representations of the speaker, as well as contextualised judgements and expectations. The study highlights the role of socio-pragmatic concerns in swearing and speaker evaluation.

The manner by which power is reified through newspaper reporting can assist community psychologists in getting a handle on the complex, often contradictory, ways by which ideology and power are constituted in relation to particular communities. Accordingly, the present study draws on discursive psychology to analyse how 377 newspaper articles construct the community of Thembelihle (a low-income community in South Africa) and how these constructions can inform counter-hegemonic strategy. Two discourses were identified in the analysis, Signifying Legitimacy and Containing the Protest Community. Where the Signifying Legitimacy discourse established a Statist legitimacy-illegitimacy binary against which Thembelihle was to be assessed, the Containing the Protest Community discourse constructed Thembelihle as a monolithic entity that enacted a wholly violent, and often directionless, mode of protest violence which was concerned with little more than 'service delivery'. Together, these discourses suggest to us the manner by which low-income communities are engaged by the State as well as how Statist representations function materially. Certainly, most newspaper articles relied on an interpretive frame whose hermeneutics were characterised primarily by violence and homogenously experienced suffering. Such representation, we argue, signifies the dominant discursive field and ideology against which counter-hegemonic strategy and (re)presentation must act.

This article aims at presenting anger as a negative emotion that generates conflict recorded and represented in the Biblical discourse. The main objective of this study is to present the cognitive, functional, and pragmatic dimensions of anger as an emotion leading to conflicts, wars and destruction. In this study the applied research methodology belongs to the discursive psychology incorporating the research tools of cognitive, and functional linguistics as well as Speech Act Theory to analyze the research material coming from The Holy Bible: New International Version, (HBNIV, 1984).

This paper introduces quality markers common to Discursive Psychology (DP) – a qualitative approach for examining talk and text. We offer a guide for researchers using DP and reviewers evaluating D...

While there are many definitions and conceptual accounts of ‘persuasion’ and other forms of social influence, social scientists lack empirical insight into how and when people actually use terms like ‘persuade’, ‘convince’, ‘change somebody's mind’ – what we call the vocabularies of social influence – in actual social interaction. We collected instances of the spontaneous use of these and other social influence terms (such as ‘schmoozing’ and ‘hoodwinking’) in face‐to‐face and telephone conversations across multiple domestic and institutional settings. The recorded data were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology and conversation analysis with a focus on the actions accomplished in and through the use of social influence terms. We found that when speakers use 'persuading' – but not 'convincing' or 'changing somebody’s mind' – it is in the service of orienting to the moral accountability of influencing others. The specificity with which social actors deploy these terms demonstrates the continued importance of developing our understandings of the meaning of words – especially psychological ones – via their vernacular use by ordinary people in the first instance, rather than have psychologists reify, operationalize, and build an architecture for social psychology without paying attention to what people actually do with the ‘psychological thesaurus’. © 2020 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Telemedicine has developed as a tool for increasing access to health-related services. However, clinicians are required to achieve effective communication and provide quality care despite the remoteness of patients. The aim of this review was to focus on the interactional components of telemedicine consultations, identifying the social and embodied practices that health care professionals and patients draw on when managing the complexities of videoconferencing technology. A systematic review of telemedicine research using conversation analysis and discursive psychology was conducted, resulting in six articles eligible for inclusion. Interactional practices were synthesized into three categories: positioning utterances, visual and audiological clarification, and directional feedback. These categories demonstrate complex but ordered multimodal interactions that position the technology and health care professional as key to ensuring effective communication. Their interactional relevance highlights a gap in telemedicine research, where the need to focus more on the communicative and clinical richness of these unique consultations is reinforced.

The use of violence as means of addressing differences between groups and individuals is common. The world has witnessed wars and small scale violence resulting from disagreements. Violence however leaves behind trails of destruction and pain in its wake. It also generally perceived as a sign of failure of the power of the intellect to address issues. It is therefore regarded as a primitive method which is employed as a last resort. Parties that have been involved in violence may therefore find need to explain the reasons for their involvement and often tend to lay blame for the violence elsewhere. This paper investigates the discursive resources employed in the management of blame in conflict situations taking the case of the Kenyan Internally Displaced Persons. The paper employs Discursive Psychology one of the approaches to discourse analysis to investigate the management of the blame arising from the violence that followed Kenya’s 2007 elections. The paper draws from a research carried out by the author among 24 Internally Displaced Persons in Kenya’s 2007/2008 post-election violence. The research sample comprised an equal number of male and female respondents who were from the different communities involved in the violence.The data was collected by means of in-depth interviews.

This paper contributes to the study of admonishments, the operation of shaming in family interaction, and more broadly presses the virtue of a discursive psychological reconsideration of the social psychology of emotion. It examines the methodological basis of contemporary research on shame in experimental and qualitative social psychology, illustrated through the Test of Self‐Conscious Affect (TOSCA) and qualitative work using shame narratives. Doubts are raised about how these methods can throw light on shaming practices in natural situations. The study uses a collection of video recordings of family mealtimes, focusing on admonishment sequences in which parents address the interrogatives ‘what are you doing’ or ‘what did I say’ to a ‘misbehaving’ child. Despite the interrogative syntax, rather than soliciting information we show that these interrogative forms pursue behaviour change by publicly highlighting both the problem behaviour and the child’s active and intentional production of that behaviour. This is the sense in which the practice can be understood as shaming. Although this practice prosecutes shaming, ways in which the children can ignore, push back, or rework parents’ actions are highlighted. This study contributes to a broader consideration of how enduring behavioural change can be approached as a parents’ project.

This paper overviews limitations in both the way attitude function has been conceptualized in social psychology, and in the empirical basis for the claims made. We suggest that the premise that att...

This paper uses Discursive Psychology (DP) to investigate formulations of worry as an interactional resource. DP conceptualizes emotion as something people display or formulate in interaction with other people, and draws on conversation analysis (CA) to examine its social functions across settings. Data consist of 366 recorded phone calls to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency's customer service for housing allowance - a benefit targeting financially vulnerable youth and families. The article examines how clients' worry is formulated (e.g., 'I'm really worried now'), what functions such formulations serve, and how they are responded to. In line with the broader DP goal of uncovering how institutions are characterized by psychological business, the study shows how worry is linked to lack of knowledge, building worry as warranted and as warranting further institutional activity (or not). Speakers thus treat worry as morally and institutionally constrained. The analysis shows how orientations to worry in the context of state welfare customer service both corresponds and contrasts with what research on worry formulations in other institutional settings has found. This highlights the way that psychology is locally specific and bound up with institutionality, and reinforces the need for close empirical analysis of psychology-relevant matters across settings.

This study explores how six teachers worked up becoming and being activists in response to education reforms in the southeastern US. The reforms, which involved increasing student testing and imple...

This article explores how teachers and pupils construct and negotiate discourses around comic books as part of interaction in the classroom from a New Literacy Studies perspective. The combination of imagery and text, the essence of comics, makes them relevant tools for exploring how literacy is constructed in social interaction in the classroom. The analysis is based on video material from two different Swedish schools, one class in Grade 3 and one class in Grade 8. Nine interactional sequences were initially found, and these have been analysed using a qualitative discursive psychological approach, investigating how assessments are utilized to perform social actions – how participants use assessments of comics as easy or difficult reading, or assessments of themselves or others as being or not being comic book readers – to make something happen in interaction. The results show that participants utilize discourses of personal, visual and textual literacy to construct a comics literacy in which image and text are both construed as important for, as well as a difficulty in, reading comics. This demonstrates constructions of comics literacy and readership, how personal experiences of reading comics are important and the importance of broadening the view of comics as school literature. Framing Education: Doing Comics Literacy in the Classroom

Central to a contemporary understanding of childhood is the developmental and clinical-medical construct of the 'normal' child. When judged to fall outside of culturally, socially and historically situated parameters of 'normality', children become labelled as 'deviant from the norm'; for instance, in mental health contexts where this may provide the basis for psychiatric diagnosis. However, judgements of a child's 'normality' are further complicated by the range of individuals who may have a stake in that construction, including parents/carers, professionals and the child themselves. Using discursive psychology, we analysed 28 video-recorded UK child mental health assessments, to examine ways that parents presented concerns about their children's development. They did this by drawing on notions of 'ab/normal', in ways that functioned to legitimise their need for services and built a rhetorical case to demonstrate clinical need; often by contrasting the child with other 'typical' children and/or contrasting the same child's behaviour in different settings or contexts. We concluded that given the growing crisis in child mental health, initial assessments play a crucial clinical role in determining diagnosis and labelling, and therefore, a critical discussion of these concepts and processes is essential.

Early work in discursive psychology highlighted the rhetorical strength of devices that serve to establish matters as objective facts. More recently, there has been increasing interest within this discipline concerning mental state invocations (e.g. imagining; knowing; intending), which typically convey speaker subjectivity. Elsewhere, linguists have examined the social business enabled by speakers’ deployment of cognitive verbs, a prime example of which deals with overt references to thinking. The current article sets out to extend the work on thinking by synthesizing research from discursive psychology, linguistics, and conversation analysis in order to undertake an integrated analysis of thinking. In our examination of a UK talk radio corpus, comprising data from 11 talk radio shows, we demonstrate three discursive functions of deploying a thinking device: setting an intersubjective agenda; doing opinion; and managing ‘facts’. An integrated approach allows us to examine the rhetorical strength of these subjectivizing maneuvers, and contribute to the existing body of work concerning the discursive deployment of thinking and mental state terms.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the way gender and gender roles are socially constructed by those who have experience of females committing sexual offences against children. Design/methodology/approach Using a discursive approach, supported by membership category analysis, a secondary analysis of qualitative data illustrates how the social construction of gender and gender roles impacts on society’s perception of females who commit sexual offences against children. Findings Discourse analysis found three patterns employed within conversation that demonstrate how the construction of women influence society’s incomprehension of females who commit sexual offences against children: women can be trusted, women do not manipulate and groom and, women are not sexually aggressive. Research limitations/implications A limitation of this study is the use of secondary data, which cannot provide the richness or detail found in primary accounts from people with this lived experience. The difficulty in accessing this sub-population highlights the hidden nature of the topic and the need for further research in this area. Originality/value This is the first study to explore how gender discourse is used in discussions of females who commit sexual offences against children. The value of this exploration highlights the need of society to adjust their perceptions of the offending capabilities of women and to ensure the experiences of people who experience this form of sexual abuse receive support.

The aim of the study is to better understand teacher agency in the provision of science education to elementary school students. This article takes a specific focus on an elementary school teacher, who positioned herself as agentic in science. The study employs grammar of agency for the operationalisation of human agency in discursive psychological terms. Teacher agency in science is defined in the study as a teachers’ positioning as professionally responsible for science teaching to varying degrees. The instrumental case of Denise, an early years teacher at an elementary school in Melbourne, Australia, provides new understanding of teacher agency in elementary school science developing as a process of self-positioning in relation to institutional practices and professional others, supported by professional development. It is of interest to designers of professional development programs, education researchers and leaders in elementary schools. Implications of the study include greater attention to the notion of relational agency in research and professional development provision for elementary school teachers in science.

Over the past decade, the choice of living childfree has increasingly been viewed as a pro-environmental behaviour. Recent research has investigated statistical relations between environmental concern and reproductive attitudes, as well as exploring the processes around actually deciding to live environmentally childfree. Based on increased public attention about the phenomenon, this article employs Michael Billig’s notion of ideological dilemmas to analyse the media coverage of choosing to live environmentally childfree, attempting to answer how these dilemmas influence whether living childfree is perceived as a relevant pro-environmental behaviour. Thirty-one news items were analysed using a synthesis of critical discursive psychology and thematic analysis. The analysis identified five ideological concepts: liberalism, sustainable development, globalism, biologism and humanism. Each of these concepts contains positions supporting and opposing the idea of living environmentally childfree in Norway. These ideological dilemmas seem to weaken the perceived relevance of living environmentally childfree, as the topic is easily dismissed or framed as irrelevant. I therefore conclude that the discourse of living environmentally childfree is analogous to how society generally relates to solutions to the environmental crises.

Recognition and misrecognition have been theorized as key concepts for social justice. Misrecognition involves being disrespected or labelled in ways which do not accord with a person's self-identify. Racism can be understood as a specific form of misrecognition but little research has explored this form or drawn on notions of misrecognition in the discursive psychological study of racism. Our study addresses this gap by drawing on discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine reports of racial encounters in public spaces, where misrecognition of the targets' nationality is invoked. We demonstrate that instances of misrecognition are judged as racism through the selection and use of categories and/or category-sensitive predicates that exclude the target of them from (national) category membership to which they claim entitlement. People reporting racialized encounters and those responding to them treat the description and evaluation of such incidents sensitively, orienting to the delicacy of alleging racism. In this article, we enhance theoretical understandings of misrecognition by showing how it is constructed interactionally and demonstrate the value of notions of recognition and misrecognition for the study of racism.

Background: The early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic prompted unprecedented displays of gratitude to healthcare workers. In the United Kingdom, gratitude was a hotly debated topic in public discourse, catalysing compelling displays of civic togetherness but also attracting criticism for being an unhelpful distraction that authorized unrealistic expectations of healthcare workers. Expressions of thanks tend to be neglected as drivers of transformation, and yet, they are important indicators of qualities to which people attach significance. Objective: This study aimed to use discursive analysis to explore how the National Health Service (NHS) was constructed in attention-attracting tweets that expressed and/or discussed gratitude to the NHS. Methods: Having determined that Twitter was the most active site for traffic relating to gratitude and the NHS, we established a corpus of 834 most-liked tweets, purposively sampled from Twitter searches on a day-by-day basis over the period of the first lockdown in the United Kingdom (22 March–28 May 2020). We developed a typology for tweets engaging with gratitude as well as analysing what the NHS was thanked for. Results: Our analysis, informed by a discursive psychology approach, found that the meanings attributed to gratitude were highly mobile and there were distinct patterns of activity. The NHS was predominantly—and sometimes idealistically—thanked for working, effort, saving and caring. Displays of gratitude were seen as incommensurable with failures of responsibility. The clap-for-carers campaign was a potent driver of affect, especially in the early parts of the lockdown. Conclusions: The social value of gratitude is implicated in the re-evaluation of the risks and rewards of healthcare and social care work in the wake of the pandemic. We caution against cynicism about gratitude overshadowing the well-being effects that expressing and receiving gratitude can engender, particularly given concerns over the detrimental effects of the pandemic on mental health. Public Contribution: This study involves the analysis of data provided by the public and published on social media.

In March 2020, schools in England were closed to all but vulnerable children and the children of key workers, as part of a national effort to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Many teachers were required to work from home as remote learning was implemented. Teaching is primarily a relational profession, and previous literature acknowledges that supportive relationships with peers help to maintain teachers' resilience and commitment during challenging periods. This paper reports on findings from a small-scale study conducted in England during the first national lockdown beginning in March 2020, which explored the impact of the requirement to teach remotely on teachers' identity and peer relationships. A discourse analysis, informed by the aims and practices of discursive psychology, was conducted in order to explore the association between constructions of peer support and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Findings indicate that teachers who presented their professional self-identity as collective rather than personal appeared to have a more positive perspective on the difficulties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. These findings, which have implications for policymakers and school leaders, contribute to the growing field of research on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education by showing the strong association between teachers' constructions of identity and their capacity to respond positively to the challenges brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a notable scarcity of empirical studies focusing on online sexual grooming using real world, naturally occurring data. Limited research with real victims (as opposed to decoys) has indicated that more overt forceful threats are employed by offenders in such interaction; however, they tell us little about how these threats are built up and managed by both parties. Furthermore, the majority of research focuses on female victims, with limited attention paid to male victims. The current study presents a discursive psychology analysis of chat logs between one offender (posing as a teenage girl) and five male victims under the age of 16 years, in order to explore how victims attempt to resist such manoeuvres in situ, and how offenders manage such resistance. The sexualized nature evidenced in our data contrasts with other findings which suggest that boys are not sexually solicited and that interactions with boys are less aggressive and forceful. Our findings demonstrate for the first time how an offender escalated his issuing of threats following victims' resistance and non-compliance to requests. Turning points that appeared odd in the online interactions suggest that they may be used to encourage children to be more reflective about any further engagement.

This article draws on eighteen qualitative in-depth interviews with female, early-career classical musicians to investigate if, and if so in which ways, recent discourse around the lack of diversity in the classical music profession has affected how young musicians talk about inequalities in the field of classical music. The article demonstrates that the research participants were aware of ongoing inequalities and discussed them openly. This marks an important shift from previously conducted research, which highlighted the ‘unspeakability’ of inequalities in the classical music profession and the cultural and creative industries. By drawing on discursive psychology, this article explores the rhetorical and ideological work that such ‘inequality talk’ performs, arguing that conversations about inequalities do not necessarily lead to political change. Divided into three analytical sections, the article demonstrates that inequality talk can become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end (such as political change); that a fatalist sentiment can characterise discussions of inequalities, presenting structural change as unachievable; and that acknowledgement and recognition of privilege, crucial to overcoming inequalities, is not a consistent feature of inequality talk, which in turn risks reinforcing the normativity of whiteness and middle-classness in the field of classical music. Overall, the article provides a detailed analysis of recently collected empirical data to caution against overly optimistic accounts of the shift towards a more open discussion of inequalities in the classical music profession and beyond.

Drawing on insights from conversation analysis, discursive psychology and social psychology, this article describes some interactional features of two celebrity TV confessionals and the resources used by the TV interviewers and celebrity guests to attribute, accept or deny responsibility for their transgressions. The analytic interest lies in how confessions are locally and interactionally managed, that is, how ‘doing confessing’ is achieved in the television interview context. We show how the host’s opening turn constrains the celebrity guest’s contribution and secures overt admission of guilt, while simultaneously inviting the celebrity guest to tell their side of the story. We also show how celebrity guests produce descriptions which minimize the extent and severity of their transgressions, reduce agency and transform the character of their transgression. In doing so, we argue that celebrity interviewees can convey mitigations and extenuations which diminish the extent of their responsibility – calling into question the very nature of their confession. We propose that our findings demonstrate the hybrid nature of interviewing in the celebrity TV confessional and contribute to our understanding of how ‘doing confessing’ in the public eye is discursively and interactionally negotiated.

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are frequently used in research to reflect the patient's perspective. In this commentary, I argue that further improvements can be made in how we develop and evaluate PROMs by viewing assessment as a type of conversation. Philosophically speaking, a PROM assessment can be conceptualized as a formal conversation that serves as a model of an informal, longer, and more nuanced conversation with a research participant about their health experience. Psychologically speaking, evidence from research in survey methodology and discursive psychology shows that respondents to self-report measures behave in ways consistent with the idea that they are doing their best to participate in a conversation, albeit an unusual one. Several suggestions are offered for creating a better conversational context through study materials and PROM instructions, and by improving the yield of cognitive interviews. It is hoped that this commentary can stimulate further discussions in our field regarding how to integrate insights about the conversational nature of assessment from survey research and discursive psychology to better reflect the patient's voice in research.

When people are in dispute with their neighbours, there are multiple routes to resolution and different services have a range of remits to support it. This article explores how noise complaints are reported to dispute resolution mediation and local council environmental services in the UK. A collection of 315 recorded telephone calls were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology, underpinned by conversation analytic methods. Analysis focused on how the same kinds of noise complaint were formulated for the remit and provision of the service called. In mediation calls, callers directly attributed the source of the noise to the agent of its production (e.g., “it’s about the neighbour”). However, reference to ‘the neighbour’ was typically omitted (at least initially) in calls to environmental health services (e.g., “I need to speak to someone about disturbance”). This comparative analysis of different settings reveals the significance of service remit for the design of complaints and the relevance of attributing cause in making a case for aid. Comparing two settings provides a propitious opportunity to demonstrate that noise is not a physically objective phenomena or neutral category, but institutionally formulated social conduct.

This study examines the management of accusations of racism in online discussions on the enactment of Yogyakarta’s land ownership instruction, banning non-indigenous Indonesians from the rights to own land in this province. A discursive psychology is applied to analyze a wide range of data collected from Facebook. The data have been obtained over a six-month period between February and July in 2018, where Facebook users had massive talks on this particular topic due to the court's dismissal of the lawsuit carried to repeal the instruction in question. The analysis reveals that Facebook users manage their accusations of racism by avoiding any explicit reference to racism, refraining from making direct accusations of racism, and making direct accusations of racism.

This article intersperses Sedgwick’s analysis of paranoid theory and critical discursive psychology, focusing in particular on tools for researching affect and emotion. It is suggested that there are some surprising convergences between Sedgwick’s conclusions about reparative ways of analysing and the emphases in critical discursive psychology. Both stress contingency and craft, the uncertain trajectories of discourses, and what Sedgwick describes as ‘the middle ranges of agency’. Key differences lie in the theory of affect adopted. Critical discursive psychology remains more committed to analyses of the ideological. A further aim of this article is to illustrate the main concerns of discursive research on affective practice. To this end, an extract from a focus group exchange concerning women’s friendships and the experience of being rejected by a friend is explored, highlighting the patterning of everyday meaning making imbued with emotion, strategic identity work, and the ways in which participants mobilise psy techniques and vocabularies to hopeful ends.

Using discursive psychology as its theoretical and methodological framework, the present study explored male Canadian undergraduate students’ accounts of their reasons for studying psychology, their experiences of being male undergraduate psychology students, and their anticipated future careers. Ten men (19–29 years-old) who were at least in their second year of study in the psychology major program were interviewed. Contrary to survey research concluding that men who make gender-atypical vocational choices conform less to masculine norms than do men who make typical academic and career choices, our participants produced contradictory accounts. On the one hand, in talking about their experiences as psychology students in the context of the gender gap, they argued that gender does not matter. On the other hand, they showed that gender does matter in brief “boy moments” when they shared tacit gender knowledge with the interviewer and in justifying their academic paths toward futures that involved leaving psychology for a male-concentrated field. Thus, gender-does-not matter was the preferred argument when gender was an explicit topic of conversation, and the doing of gender occurred in unacknowledged ways.

Internet revenue is currently threatened by an increase in the use of advertisement blocking software. This presents a moral problem for Internet users, as by blocking advertisements, they deprive content creators of income for their work. Four hundred and thirty-six comments taken from three naturally occurring online discussions were analyzed from a discursive psychological perspective to explore how posters engage with online debates concerning the morality of blocking advertisements. Posters were found to orientate to a moral dimension against blocking online advertisements. They sought to manage this moral dimension by drawing upon the neutralization techniques of denial of responsibility, denial of injury, condemnation of the condemners, and appeals to higher loyalty. Two aspects of neutralization discourse have also been shown to be used in a novel manner. Rather than denying the victim, Internet users adopt the subject position of “victim” for themselves. Rather than denying injury, they present themselves as injured by online advertising. Posters here present blocking online advertisements as being in their own best interests. In order to change this behavior, then, advertisers must reposition themselves with consumers, to orientate to the presence of advertising online as mutually beneficial, rather than parasitic.

In many Western democratic societies, the far-right has considerable popular support and is often perceived as the winner of political debates. This raises the important question of how other politicians try to manage the far-right. We use parliamentary debates to examine how politicians define the identity of Member of Parliament (MP) in response to Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that politicians made relevant the shared responsibility of MPs to solve societal problems, by using inclusive language, asking for concrete proposals, and emphasizing engagement in debate. These identity-related features question the parliamentary role performance of the far-right. In response, Wilders stressed the MP's responsibility of representing the ordinary people. The politicians used three strategies to challenge this defence: Questioning that the far-right actually fulfils their self-ascribed representative role; challenging the notion that only the far-right would represent the people; moving into a more populist position. Implications for social psychological research on marginal group members are discussed.

This paper focuses on the argumentative role of making factual claims and counterclaims in broadcast political debates. Despite the rise of “post-truth politics”, this paper argues that orientations to issues of ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ are a live and controversial matter when debating the European Union. Using Discursive Psychology (DP) the analysis is on how politicians use fact-based (counter)claims in multi-party interactions, in the form of debates about the UK and the European Union. Three types of factual challenges are presented to illustrate the rhetorical function of claims: challenging the essence of an argument, providing another fact to re-contextualise the preceding fact and using hypothetical scenarios to undermine facts. The analysis demonstrates that the use of facts is a highly strategic, argumentative, matter. This study, understood against a backdrop of the rise of “post-truth politics”, highlights that concepts of ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ are not done away with; rather they are an argumentative resource and need to be understood in their fragmentary and rhetorical context.

This chapter contributes to the further development of Discursive Psychology by examining how children are socialized towards culturally appropriate ways of bodily conduct in preschool settings in India. The study considers how embodied resources are used in parallel with verbal discourse and how children’s bodies are treated as accountable objects in teacher-child interactions. The findings demonstrate that the teacher draws on a variety of overt behaviour management practices but also on more subtle actions that give children a second chance to comply. The examples show how the teacher orients to children’s agency and intentionality, and how embodied resources may serve as an upgrade of discursive resources. Finally, this chapter discusses how these practices can be seen in the wider cultural context of socialization ideologies.

The rhetorical investigation of multimodality in political discourse is a growing concern for discursive researchers adopting critical approaches. The study of political cartoons is a prime example of how both visual and linguistic meaning can be constructed and interpreted based on its prevailing social, cultural and political settings. Adopting a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach, this chapter further pursues the study of multimodality in political communication by examining a corpus of political cartoons—drawn from the UK and beyond—concerned with the UK’s Referendum on membership of the European Union and the subsequent vote to leave in 2016. We analyse how the rhetoric of these cartoons flags the construction of national identity, otherness and belonging, lending themselves to condensed ideological messages seeking to frame Brexit. It is argued such cartoons can be seen as micro-instances of the anchoring of Brexit as a self-referential political divide defined by oppositional discourses and their accompanying intellectual legacy. A phenomenon, which, we contend, is richly explained by the rhetorical communication of the visual alongside the linguistic. We conclude the chapter by reflecting on how MCDA can assist our understanding of political communication and contribute to the critical tradition of discursive psychological work.

The nature of the link between identity and action is a fundamental question for social science. One focus in psychology is how actions like seeking help are implicated in matters of identity. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of identity and help in social interaction. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 400 recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how participants oriented to the link between identity and help. With attention to epistemic, deontic, and affective relations between participants, I analysed how identity was demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential for building and interpreting help-seeking requests. Participants displayed an understanding that seeking help from Victim Support necessarily implicates identity. Callers' identities as victims or clients rendered their help-seeking accountable and invoked identities for call-takers as representatives of a support service. The findings show that identity and help are mutually constitutive. Seeking help constituted callers' identities as victims; and their identities as victims constituted their requests for help. I suggest that analysing identity and help in social interaction provides evidence for the mutually constitutive link between identity and action.

Current special education research involving children labeled with significant intellectual and developmental disabilities (SIDD) has been based on ideologies that frame teaching and learning as the training of children to perform behaviors intended to mediate medical impairments and maximize children’s life skills (Anzul et al. in Exceptional Children, 67(2): 235–249, 2001; Thomas & O’Hanlon in Deconstructing Special Education and Constructing Inclusion. McGraw, New York, NY, 2007). We use disability studies in education (Connor in Disability Studies Quarterly, 34 (2), 2014) and discursive psychology (Potter in Theory & Psychology, 10: 31–37, 2000) to critique the abled/disabled dichotomy. Findings illustrate how the dis/abilities of students were constructed within interactions and highlight the tension—between deficit and possibility—inherent in dis/ability, as the children persistently expressed their humanity even as it was suppressed within instructional contexts.

Diagnosis of child and adolescent mental health conditions is typically preceded by a mental health assessment. This initial screening appointment is an important one for the family to present their case of clinical need. During this presentation of need, parents, children or young people, and other present members rhetorically organize their accounts to illuminate the difficulties they are encountering at home and in other social spaces. In the chapter, I utilize discursive psychology to illustrate how parents build a case that their child has mental health need, and in doing so how they account for the ‘burden’ the child’s behaviours and difficulties have on family life. They do this through the social action of a complaint, managing their stake in the doctorable outcome and by accounting for the child’s behaviour through medicalized discourses. Thus, discursive psychology makes visible the ways in which parents engage with institutional business and language to build a persuasive case to accomplish a certain positioning of their child.

Over the past decade, there has been a notable increase in media coverage and legislation about dyslexia. Much of this coverage has focused on students in K-12 settings though previous research suggests that dyslexia labels have an impact on older students and adults as well. The purpose of the study described in this chapter is to investigate how university students with dyslexia labels use language to describe their own experiences with dyslexia. We used Critical Discursive Psychology to analyze 28 semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students to examine the ways they spoke about dyslexia and their literacy experiences. Our analyses revealed that participants’ descriptions of dyslexia and related experiences emphasized the isolation and individual nature of the label, time as a defining factor in describing said experiences, and participants’ ambivalence about dyslexia labels and identification. These findings could inform accommodation policies in higher ed and future research on the nature and meaning of dyslexia.

Norms regarding childhood and parenthood differ between social contexts. The present study focuses on Swedish middle-class parents of young children. Based on semi-structured interviews, the study aims to explore norms and ideals regarding children’s emotions and how parents should respond to them. Analysis is informed by discursive psychology, with a focus on ideological dilemmas. Most parents acknowledged an ideal where children are seen as entitled to their own emotions and having the full right to express them. Related to this, two different parenting ideals were identified. The first stipulates that parents should allow and validate the child’s emotional expressions. The second stipulates that parents should be in control of their own emotions, in order to enable children to express theirs. Both ideals were negotiated by the parents as they contradict other ideals and everyday realities.

This chapter offers a response to Chapters 4, 6, and 7 within the volume, highlighting the connections between disability studies and discursive psychology. Specifically, the chapter highlights links to materialist disability studies and critical phenomenology of disability, while also pointing to key ideas raised within each of the three chapters.