Dispatching Emergency Assistance: Callers' Claims of Entitlement and Call Takers' Decisions

Abstract

Staff who take calls at the emergency centers in Denmark have to decide whether, on hearing what the caller first says, to (a) immediately start asking dispatch-relevant questions (for example, the caller's address) or (b) first check whether the reported incident is actually an emergency at all. The call takers' choice not only conveys different signals to the caller with regard to whether or not assistance will be granted but also has consequences for the emergency centers' response times. In this study, I focus on cases where callers present their reason for calling by means of an overt request, without providing any information about the incident. I show that what the call takers base their initial decision on is the claim of entitlement that the callers encode into their request. The downside of this staff practice is that subsequent questioning may, in fact, reveal the decision to be inaccurate and the dispatch of assistance to have been either prematurely initiated or unduly delayed. I explicate the mechanisms involved, how the calls play out, and what the implications might be.

Acknowledgments

The study reported in this article was initially developed at the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, Aarhus University, as part of a European Science Foundation project on Language as Social Action: A Comparative Research Project on Affiliation and Disaffiliation Across National Communities and Institutional Contexts (2003–2007). Earlier versions of this article were presented at the ESF workshop on Affiliation and Disaffiliation in Bertinoro, Italy, in October 2005; the International Conference on Conversation Analysis in Helsinki, Finland, in May 2006; the workshop on Call Centres and Emergency Calls at University Lumière Lyon 2, France, in April 2007; and the workshop on Alarm Communication at Bielefeld University, Germany, in February 2011. I would like to thank Charles Antaki, Paul Drew, Torben Jakobsen, Johannes Wagner, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of the article. I am particularly grateful to Jakob Steensig for his support, encouragement, and generous feedback throughout. I am of course solely responsible for what I have made of all suggestions and comments.

Notes

¹All data extracts are published with the permission of the Danish Police.

²As a single exception, + mark increases and ÷ decreases in volume.

³The ethnographic recordings were collected as part of the PalCom project on palpable, pervasive computing and were made available to me by Monika Büscher, whose help is gratefully acknowledged.

⁴Due to the lack of a 1:1-correspondence between Danish and English request formats (cf. Table 1), I will use a 3-line translation of the caller's requests from here on.