Doing “Care Work” in Emergency Service Calls

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Care Work
• Conversation Analysis
• Emergency Service Calls
• Emotions
• Interactional Competence

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper was written as part of a sabbatical provided by Bentley University; there was no grant money associated with the paper.

Notes on contributors

Angela Cora Garcia

Angela Cora Garcia is a professor in the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. She is the author of a textbook on conversation analysis, An Introduction to Interaction: Understanding Talk in Formal and Informal Settings (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2013), and a conversation analytic study of mediation, How Mediation Works: Resolving Conflict through Talk (Cambridge University Press, 2019). In addition to her studies of mediation, she also studies emergency telephone calls, air traffic communications, talk in political contexts, and sociology of leisure.