Constituting agency in the delivery of telephone-mediated victim support

ABSTRACT

In telephone helpline interactions, a practical problem for participants is how to advance a relevant course of action about what can be done within the institution’s remit that may not be what a caller asks for or needs. This study investigates how call-takers progress delivering support for callers ringing a service for victims of crime and trauma. It focuses on how actions are advanced by the call-taker using linguistic formats that can be broadly characterised as directive-commissive speech acts. The research asks how agency is constituted through the linguistic format parties’ use to display what can be done and who decides. Using conversation analysis to examine 80 cases where the delivery of support is progressed, the results show that subtle morpho-syntactic variation in the format of interrogatives (i.e., ‘Did you want to,’ ‘Do you want to’) display orientations to who can do or decide upon a future course of action. Evidence is presented that the ‘did you form’ tilts the agency toward the Self as something she can progress whereas the ‘do you’ format tilts the balance toward the Other to decide. More obviously, the actions can be formulated in terms of the Self committing to an action (e.g., ‘I’ll pop you through’) or as clearly deferring to the Other to decide (e.g., ‘would you like me to’). This study furthers the general intellectual project of discursive psychology by providing an empirical demonstration of the way classic questions about the nature of subjectivity and individual agency can be re-specified as shared practices for accomplishing action in social interaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• subjectivity
• conversation analysis
• ethnomethodology
• deontics
• power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some target sequences had more than one form, and others had more complex grammatical structures including if-then clauses which were included in these frequency counts. Also, not included in these counts were we-formatted utterances or the less frequent forms. In sum, these counts and percentages are not absolute but indicative of the relative frequency of the forms that were I- and you- formatted in the data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann Weatherall

Ann Weatherall is a professor in psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.  Often finding inspiration from feminism, her research is located within discursive psychology and conversation analysis.  She aims to transform and broaden psychological theory and knowledge on classic topics including age, cognition, gender, emotion, identity and sexuality.  She is currently leading a Royal Society of New Zealand, Marsden funded project on feminist self defense as an effective intervention for gender-based violence.