This article explores the nature of argumentative interaction in the hybrid political interview: a broadcast news genre whose discourse positions the journalist not just as investigator but as socio-political advocate. Such interviews offer explicit challenges to the traditionally conceived ‘neutral’ role of the broadcast news journalist. Interviewer ‘non-neutrality’ is examined in contexts where the speech exchange system shifts into the unmitigated and aggravated opposition characteristic of argument. Drawing on a sample of interviews involving different hosts, I analyse the structural features (...) of both interviewer and interviewee turns that occur in these environments. I do this in relation both to sequential matters — that is, the types of turns taken and their relations with other turns in their immediate environment — and to matters of the substantive content of utterances — that is, what speakers are saying and/or the way they are saying it. (shrink)

This article presents an investigation of the organization and structures of talk-in-interaction over mobile phone. The analysis is based upon naturally occurring data consisting of a corpus of calls recorded during everyday activities of a young adult. Using these data we reveal a range of sequential phenomena associated with mobile phone usage. Established conversation analytic work on landline telephone conversation is used in order to build a comparative analysis of how actions such as openings, caller–called identity management, and topic introduction (...) are accomplished in mobile vs landline telephone conversation. We first show that, far from revolutionizing the organization of telephone conversation, mobile phone talk retains many of the norms associated with landline phone talk. Subsequently, focusing on those modifications that are identifiable in our data, we show how these are related to aspects of the communicative affordances of mobile phones, orientations to which are observable in the talk of participants in mobile phone conversation. (shrink)

Using video to facilitate data collection has become increasingly common in health research. Using video in research, however, does raise additional ethical concerns. In this paper we utilize family therapy data to provide empirical evidence of how recording equipment is treated. We show that families made a distinction between what was observed through the video by the reflecting team and what was being recorded onto videotape. We show that all parties actively negotiated what should and should not go ‘on the (...) record’, with particular attention to sensitive topics and the responsibility of the therapist. Our findings have important implications for both clinical professionals and researchers using video data. We maintain that informed consent should be an ongoing process and with this in mind we present some arguments pertaining to the current debates in this field of health-care practice. (shrink)

This article builds on a range of work analysing interactive properties of text-based technologically mediated communication which has revealed its deeply interactive properties. Based on a corpus of 1250 SMS text messages, it examines in detail the sequential organization revealed in extended series of text exchanges. Adopting methods and findings from conversation analysis, the study looks at the internal construction of texts as interactive artefacts, focusing on the production of both single-unit and multi-unit messages, and analyses how participants construct exchanges (...) that show both similarities and differences with sequential organization in verbal conversation. (shrink)

Radio phone-ins, or `talk radio' shows, represent a popular environment in which members of the public at large may discuss the news of the day from their own perspective. This article explores some discursive devices that are used in legitimating, or authenticating, lay speakers' opinions about news in this environment. A number of examples of calls to a talk radio show are examined in order to show the oriented-to importance of `witnessing' in establishing the legitimacy of an opinion. A range (...) of factors are discussed, including: the variety of types of first-hand knowledge that may be invoked; the sequential and interactional contexts in which first-hand knowledge is invoked; and the way in which first-hand knowledge itself may be used not just to legitimate, but to undermine, the status of a caller's contribution to the show's debate. (shrink)

The use of video for research purposes is something that has attracted ethical attention and debate. While the usefulness of video as a mechanism to collect data is widely agreed, the ethical sensitivity and impact of recording equipment is more contentious. In some clinical settings the presence of a camera has a dual role, as a portal to a reflecting team and as a recording device to obtain research data. Using data from one such setting, family therapy sessions, this article (...) shows how the role played by recording equipment is negotiated in the course of talk and other activities that constitute sessions. Analysis reveals that members of the therapy interaction orient in different ways and for different purposes to the value of recordings. The article concludes that there are layers of benefit to be derived from recording of clinical interactions, including for members themselves, and this has wider implications for the ways in which qualitative research designs in health sciences are evaluated. (shrink)

This article examines a particular kind of business-opening activity found in a specific, and little analysed, type of institutional group meeting: group supervision for psychotherapeutic counsellors. The data consist of a particular set of activities that occur in the initial stages of these meetings, which are neither the kind of pre-meeting talk identified by previous research on interaction in meetings, nor specifically the business of group supervision itself. This phase, referred to as the ‘check-in’, functions as an interim stage between (...) small talk and getting down to business. The analysis shows how the check-in comprises a highly structured set of linguistic sequences whose production is bound up with one of the key interactional features of group supervision: the collaborative orientation to the production and relevance of ‘feelings-talk’. (shrink)

Childhood is increasingly saturated by technology: from television to the Internet, video games to 'video nasties', camcorders to personal computers. _Children, Technology and Culture_ looks at the interplay of children and technology which poses critical questions for how we understand the nature of childhood in late modern society. This collection brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to address the following four aspects of this relationship between children and technology: *children's access to technologies and the implications for social relationships (...) *the structural contexts of children's engagement with technologies with a focus on gender and the family *the situatedness of children's interactions with technological objects *the constitution of children and childhood through the mediations of technology _ This book represents a substantial contribution to contemporary social scientific thinking both about the nature of children and childhood, the social impacts of technologies and the various relationships between the two. (shrink)

Arminen claimsthattworecentstudiesof mobilephone conversation come up with incommensurate findings. He relates this to two distinct approaches to the methodology of conversation analysis. In this reply I show that the two studies in question are not incommensurate and argue that Arminen's account is based on a partial description of the findings in Hutchby and Barnett. I go on to show how the latter study presents an approach to the problematic relationship in CA between talk and extraneous contingencies that goes further than (...) Arminen's own proposals. (shrink)

Data from naturally occurring child counselling sessions are used to explore how counsellors seek to elicit therapeutically relevant talk in the face of resistance, or non-cooperation, from children. Focusing on a case in which a 6-year-old child persistently avoids collaborating in the kind of counselling talk that the counsellor is evidently aiming to produce, the analysis focuses both on the child's resistance strategies and on the counsellor's techniques for attempting to combat resistance and work towards a therapeutically relevant outcome. The (...) article makes a contribution both to our understanding of the social and communicative competencies of children, especially in institutional settings, and to our understanding of the practices, discursive techniques and competencies of child counsellors. (shrink)

This article examines discourse practices surrounding children’s participation, non-participation, and the ‘moral order’ of the family in the setting of family therapy consultations. The analysis focuses on two central issues. First, the relationship between therapists’ questions, the speaker selection techniques built into those questions, and the responses produced by family members. Second, the relationship between turn-taking and the linguistic features of person deixis in disputes that emerge around children’s orientation to implicit accusations in the talk of other participants about them. (...) The findings reveal how a familial ‘moral order’ is often at the root of how children’s competence as participants is managed by the parents, the therapist, and the children themselves. (shrink)