Memory in Interaction: An Analysis of Repeat Calls to a Home Birth Helpline

Abstract

Drawing on a corpus of 80 calls to a Home Birth helpline, we use conversation analysis to analyze how callers and call takers display to one another that they are talking for a second or subsequent time. We focus in particular on the role of memory in these interactions. We show how caller and call taker are oriented to remembering at the beginning of calls as displayed in what we call the recognition-solicit pre-sequence, how participants are oriented to issues of forgetting and remembering during the course of repeat calls, and how remembering and forgetting are made manifest in interaction. Our analysis shows how the human capacity to remember and propensity to forget have reverberating implications in calling for help.

Notes

We are enormously grateful to Sheila Kitzinger of the Home Birth organization for collecting this data set for us and for her continuing help and encouragement in our analysis. We also want to thank all the women who allowed us to tape their calls. We are grateful to Richard Ogden, Geoffrey Raymond, Emanuel Schegloff, and Sue Wilkinson for helpful discussion of various analytic points and to Derek Edwards for thoughtful editorial feedback.

The very beginnings of most calls are missing from our corpus because the call taker does not usually record until she has gained ethical clearance—after which calls are usually further disrupted by the call-taker's need to move from one room to another to operate the recording device. (Note that she is taking calls at home and does not have a dedicated Home Birth line).

This term is adapted from the work by Heritage (1985) and Heritage and Watson (1979, 1980) who have developed Garfinkel and Sacks's (1970) work on “formulations” defined as follows: A member may treat some part of the conversation as an occasion to describe that conversation, to explain it, or characterize it, or explicate, or translate, or summarise, or furnish the gist of it, to take note of its accordance with rules, or remark on its departure from rules. That is to say, a member may use some part of the conversation as an occasion to formulate the conversation […]. (p. 350, emphasis in original).

Names of people, places, hospitals, and so on are pseudonyms. Calls were numbered consecutively from 1 through 80 in the order in which they were recorded. Note that due to recording omissions and accidental deletions by the call taker, we do not have all the first calls from those callers from whom we have what are clearly repeat calls (and presumably we also do not have all the repeat calls from callers from whom we have first calls).

We have shown that the caller orients to the possibility that she is telling again information conveyed in a previous call. So, too, does the call taker—although there is no space to develop an analysis of this here. One illustrative data example must suffice. In her first call to the helpline, Millie expressed concern about shoulder dystocia and the call taker described how delivery of the shoulders can be facilitated by getting on to all fours. In Millie's second call, she continues to express anxiety about shoulder dystocia, and the call taker again mentions this method of delivery, marking it as possibly previously conveyed information (“I don't know if I told you,” lines 1–2 in the following), which Millie receipts as previously known (“That's right,” line 4): [Millie 33: Second call]

01 Clt: .hhh But uh (.) uh I don't know if I

02 told you: .h getting on to all fours is

03 a great help [too.]

04 Mil: [That]'s ri:ght. And that's

05 much:- that's what I'd much rather do:[ : .]

06 Clt: [mm]

This example illustrates then that the concern not to tell again as if for the first time is a concern of both participants in the interaction.