Identity and help in calls to Victim Support

<p>The link between identity and action is a fundamental topic across the social sciences. A key site to investigate this relationship is social interaction, where identities and social relations are built and used to accomplish action. In this thesis, I used discursive psychology to analyse the relationship between identity and the action of help in recorded calls to a victim support helpline. Victim is a contentious identity, with feminists and other critical scholars pointing to the politics involved when certain people are categorised as victims and others are overlooked. The name of the organisation that was the setting for my research, ‘Victim Support,’ explicitly links a victim identity with rights to access the help the service offers. Drawing on concepts in discursive psychology and using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I examined how participants oriented to the contentious questions of who victims are and how they should be helped. Drawing on contemporary interactional research which theorises the epistemic, deontic, and affective basis of human social relations, I examined how participants used self-other relations as a resource to build and interpret actions as help. The findings provide evidence for the mutually constitutive relationship between identity and action. Counter-intuitively, most callers did not explicitly categorise themselves as victims when asking for help. My analyses show how call-takers understood callers’ identities as victims even when they did not say so directly. The act of asking for help from Victim Support constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities rendered their requests accountable. Call-takers on the victim helpline act as gate-keepers, determining callers’ eligibility before providing help. I analysed how call-takers denied callers’ requests by implicitly or explicitly disavowing their identities as victims. Conversely, I showed that offers of help constituted callers as legitimate victims. Yet even once participants had accomplished joint understanding of callers as victims, they negotiated their respective epistemic and deontic rights to determine what help was needed and how it should be provided. The negotiation of how victims should be helped was particularly salient when callers sought help on behalf of others. Participants negotiated whether the moral obligation to help victims was associated with friends and family members, or institutions. The emotional support and practical advice offered by Victim Support is delivered by volunteer support workers, reflecting a common-sense assumption that these forms of help are normatively available to any competent person. My analyses attend to the dilemmas involved when callers sought help for others rather than providing it themselves. The findings contribute to three main areas of research: conversation analytic study of help as social action; membership categorisation analysis research on categorically organised rights and obligations; and the re-specification of psychological phenomenon as interactional objects within discursive psychology. The mutually constitutive link between identity and help is consequential, as the provision or withholding support can have material effects when callers are highly distressed or in fear for their lives. Thus, studying real-life interaction demonstrates the practical ways identity matters for seeking help.</p>

Identity and help in calls to Victim Support

<p>The link between identity and action is a fundamental topic across the social sciences. A key site to investigate this relationship is social interaction, where identities and social relations are built and used to accomplish action. In this thesis, I used discursive psychology to analyse the relationship between identity and the action of help in recorded calls to a victim support helpline. Victim is a contentious identity, with feminists and other critical scholars pointing to the politics involved when certain people are categorised as victims and others are overlooked. The name of the organisation that was the setting for my research, ‘Victim Support,’ explicitly links a victim identity with rights to access the help the service offers. Drawing on concepts in discursive psychology and using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I examined how participants oriented to the contentious questions of who victims are and how they should be helped. Drawing on contemporary interactional research which theorises the epistemic, deontic, and affective basis of human social relations, I examined how participants used self-other relations as a resource to build and interpret actions as help. The findings provide evidence for the mutually constitutive relationship between identity and action. Counter-intuitively, most callers did not explicitly categorise themselves as victims when asking for help. My analyses show how call-takers understood callers’ identities as victims even when they did not say so directly. The act of asking for help from Victim Support constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities rendered their requests accountable. Call-takers on the victim helpline act as gate-keepers, determining callers’ eligibility before providing help. I analysed how call-takers denied callers’ requests by implicitly or explicitly disavowing their identities as victims. Conversely, I showed that offers of help constituted callers as legitimate victims. Yet even once participants had accomplished joint understanding of callers as victims, they negotiated their respective epistemic and deontic rights to determine what help was needed and how it should be provided. The negotiation of how victims should be helped was particularly salient when callers sought help on behalf of others. Participants negotiated whether the moral obligation to help victims was associated with friends and family members, or institutions. The emotional support and practical advice offered by Victim Support is delivered by volunteer support workers, reflecting a common-sense assumption that these forms of help are normatively available to any competent person. My analyses attend to the dilemmas involved when callers sought help for others rather than providing it themselves. The findings contribute to three main areas of research: conversation analytic study of help as social action; membership categorisation analysis research on categorically organised rights and obligations; and the re-specification of psychological phenomenon as interactional objects within discursive psychology. The mutually constitutive link between identity and help is consequential, as the provision or withholding support can have material effects when callers are highly distressed or in fear for their lives. Thus, studying real-life interaction demonstrates the practical ways identity matters for seeking help.</p>

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY ON NEW MEDIA: EKSI SOZLUK AND INTERPRETATIVE REPERTOIRES

In this article, the entries about “being a man” on Ekşi Sözlük are analysed through the Critical Discursive Psychology approach. The extracts were analysed with the Critical Discursive Psychology approach and interpretative repertoires were revealed. As a result of the analysis, 6 different interpretative repertoires were obtained. In the first of these, “The ‘essence’ and ‘other’ inside the man” repertoire, being a man is explained based on the "natural-given" differences. In the "preoccupation with sexuality" repertoire, sexuality is positioned in the most central area of men's lives. In the "responsibilities and obligations" repertoire, being a man is defined by a number of responsibilities expected from men by society. In the "patriarchal system and the mother's son" repertoire, it is stated that men's behavioral practices are determined by the patriarchal system and this is supported and maintained by mothers. In the "car, football, repairs: masculine performance" repertoire, it is stated that certain masculine activities serve as the criteria for being a man. Finally, the meaning in the "woman versus masculinity" repertoire, being a man is defined over the oppositions established with women. Keywords Masculinity, critical discursive psychology, interpretative repertoires, new media

Policy Practitioners’ Engagement With Evidence-Based Policy: A discursive analysis

<p><b>The idea that there should be a link between systematically structured knowledge and the policies pursued by governments is not new. Its pre-20th century roots include attempts to establish a ‘science of society’ by social reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, aspects of the emergence of the modern state system and, arguably, stretch back to classical philosophy and religious scholarship. Since the late 1990s, however, it has assumed special prominence as a global movement that encourages jurisdictions to explicitly incorporate the language of evidence in their understanding and definitions of good policy. While this agenda goes by a number of names, the most common is ‘evidence-based policy’ (EBP). </b></p> <p>This evidentiary turn in policy has generated an extensive body of associated scholarship, involving a diverse range of theoretical positions, critiques, and debates. However, such literature has largely concentrated on macro- and meso-level system issues: structures for knowledge uptake and transfer, principles for using evidence, and underlying conceptual debates. Far less well-explored – and almost entirely absent in relation to Aotearoa New Zealand – are the experiences and perspectives of the practitioners working in policy development. This gap is especially glaring if policy work is treated not as a process of problem-solving, but rather as a humanistic and socially situated practice. Treating practitioners as active and interested participants in the creation of policy means treating them as the ultimate determinants of how evidence manifests in, and influences the outputs of, policy work. Similarly, through their work policy officials create and adopt formal and informal evidentiary definitions, accepted standards, and relevant weightings. It is through applying these social constructs that ‘information’ is transformed into ‘evidence’. While such practices are constrained by the environments within which they work, it is ultimately the practitioner who locates, analyses, and incorporates evidence within policy work. </p> <p>In this thesis, I use the concept of interpretive repertoires from discursive psychology as frameworks to explore how those involved in policy work engage with the idea of evidence-based policy. These repertoires are symbolic sets of meanings, characterisations, and relationships that people can use as resources for engaging with phenomena. Just as a musician’s repertoire represents a set of pre-existing pieces that they can perform, an interpretive repertoire is a pre-existing conceptual framework that a person can use to interpret (or establish the meaning of) ideas, actions, or settings and link them to each other in a coherent way. I approach this topic from an interpretive and critical perspective, taking policies as the results of a fundamentally social process shaped by the interaction of different values, interests, and cultural assumptions. The research has involved in-depth interviews with senior officials in the field of skills policy, including advisors and analysts, managers overseeing teams of such officials, and officials focused on developing and generating evidence for policy. I analysed interview texts to identify repertoires operating across three domains: repertoires of practice (what it means to work as a policy official), repertoires of context (what influences the environment in which officials work), and repertoires of evidence (the role of evidence in policy work). </p> <p>I identified three main repertoires each of practice and context, and five main repertoires of evidence. I also found that individual repertoires clustered across domains to produce three interpretive stances toward evidence-based policy work. The Evaluative stance is characterised by valorising diversity, debate, and judgement; the Scientific stance values rigour, truth-seeking, and consistency; and the Pragmatic stance emphasises utility, compromise, and sustainability. Each stance integrates practitioners’ constructions of the work they do, the context for that work, and the purpose of evidence into a coherent framework of meaning that supports them to engage with the abstract concept of evidence-based policy. </p> <p>This work contributes primarily to two key literatures. Firstly, the thesis adds to a relatively small but growing body of empirical research into evidence use in policy work environments. It makes a particularly novel contribution here by situating evidence use as a type of social process, and focusing on deep exploration of practitioner ‘voice’ as a way of analysing this process. Secondly, the research makes a methodological contribution to the analysis of policy work by demonstrating the value of using concepts from discursive psychology as a way of exploring the position of practitioners within the policy environment. Through discussion of the repertoires and stances I identified in practitioners’ interviews, I present a more nuanced picture of approaches towards evidence amongst policy practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand.</p>

Policy Practitioners’ Engagement With Evidence-Based Policy: A discursive analysis

<p><b>The idea that there should be a link between systematically structured knowledge and the policies pursued by governments is not new. Its pre-20th century roots include attempts to establish a ‘science of society’ by social reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, aspects of the emergence of the modern state system and, arguably, stretch back to classical philosophy and religious scholarship. Since the late 1990s, however, it has assumed special prominence as a global movement that encourages jurisdictions to explicitly incorporate the language of evidence in their understanding and definitions of good policy. While this agenda goes by a number of names, the most common is ‘evidence-based policy’ (EBP). </b></p> <p>This evidentiary turn in policy has generated an extensive body of associated scholarship, involving a diverse range of theoretical positions, critiques, and debates. However, such literature has largely concentrated on macro- and meso-level system issues: structures for knowledge uptake and transfer, principles for using evidence, and underlying conceptual debates. Far less well-explored – and almost entirely absent in relation to Aotearoa New Zealand – are the experiences and perspectives of the practitioners working in policy development. This gap is especially glaring if policy work is treated not as a process of problem-solving, but rather as a humanistic and socially situated practice. Treating practitioners as active and interested participants in the creation of policy means treating them as the ultimate determinants of how evidence manifests in, and influences the outputs of, policy work. Similarly, through their work policy officials create and adopt formal and informal evidentiary definitions, accepted standards, and relevant weightings. It is through applying these social constructs that ‘information’ is transformed into ‘evidence’. While such practices are constrained by the environments within which they work, it is ultimately the practitioner who locates, analyses, and incorporates evidence within policy work. </p> <p>In this thesis, I use the concept of interpretive repertoires from discursive psychology as frameworks to explore how those involved in policy work engage with the idea of evidence-based policy. These repertoires are symbolic sets of meanings, characterisations, and relationships that people can use as resources for engaging with phenomena. Just as a musician’s repertoire represents a set of pre-existing pieces that they can perform, an interpretive repertoire is a pre-existing conceptual framework that a person can use to interpret (or establish the meaning of) ideas, actions, or settings and link them to each other in a coherent way. I approach this topic from an interpretive and critical perspective, taking policies as the results of a fundamentally social process shaped by the interaction of different values, interests, and cultural assumptions. The research has involved in-depth interviews with senior officials in the field of skills policy, including advisors and analysts, managers overseeing teams of such officials, and officials focused on developing and generating evidence for policy. I analysed interview texts to identify repertoires operating across three domains: repertoires of practice (what it means to work as a policy official), repertoires of context (what influences the environment in which officials work), and repertoires of evidence (the role of evidence in policy work). </p> <p>I identified three main repertoires each of practice and context, and five main repertoires of evidence. I also found that individual repertoires clustered across domains to produce three interpretive stances toward evidence-based policy work. The Evaluative stance is characterised by valorising diversity, debate, and judgement; the Scientific stance values rigour, truth-seeking, and consistency; and the Pragmatic stance emphasises utility, compromise, and sustainability. Each stance integrates practitioners’ constructions of the work they do, the context for that work, and the purpose of evidence into a coherent framework of meaning that supports them to engage with the abstract concept of evidence-based policy. </p> <p>This work contributes primarily to two key literatures. Firstly, the thesis adds to a relatively small but growing body of empirical research into evidence use in policy work environments. It makes a particularly novel contribution here by situating evidence use as a type of social process, and focusing on deep exploration of practitioner ‘voice’ as a way of analysing this process. Secondly, the research makes a methodological contribution to the analysis of policy work by demonstrating the value of using concepts from discursive psychology as a way of exploring the position of practitioners within the policy environment. Through discussion of the repertoires and stances I identified in practitioners’ interviews, I present a more nuanced picture of approaches towards evidence amongst policy practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand.</p>

Discursive Psychology and Journalism

Discursive psychology is focussed on the microanalysis of the language—how specific words and practices can perform specific actions and how alternate ways of describing the situation are omitted. In this chapter, a review is presented of discursive psychology and its application to media research. This is followed by an illustrative case study based on newspaper headlines relating to Brexit, the process of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union following the referendum on UK membership in June 2016. Finally, the chapter proposes that discursive analyses can not only help readers explore how particular events, people, and texts are constructed in the news but also help journalists understand how readers might interpret their words and what inferences may be drawn from this.