Mark Rapley
Biographic Data
| ID | 234487 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Rapley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Rapley |
| SIGNATURE | RAPLEY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Murdoch University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 217 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Meaning of Coping for Psychiatric Patients
Contemporary psychiatric theory holds that a precipitant of major mental illness is the inability of some vulnerable individuals to cope with the difficulties of everyday life. Such mentally ill people are characterized as having deficient, dysfunctional, or absent coping skills. Recently, researchers have exerted considerable effort to distinguish between productive and nonproductive coping. In this article, we argue that not only are such conce…
Young Heterosexual Men’s Use of the Miscommunication Model in Explaining Acquaintance Rape
Real Italians and wogs’
We explore the discursive construction of Italian identity among a bilingual sample of Italian‐born Western Australians. Focus groups were held with two groups: Italians who had migrated to Australia as children and a group who had migrated as adults. We found intra‐ and inter‐individual differences in identity construction, with much discourse devoted to demonstrating Italian authenticity and negotiating ethnic category boundaries. Shared marker…
ADHD patient' or `illicit drug user'? Managing medico-moral membership categories in drug dependence services
Amphetamine-dependent patients seeking treatment are diagnosed with ADHD at a significantly higher rate than members of the general population. To study this relationship as it is constructed in everyday life, we draw on membership categorization analysis to examine how individuals account for their candidate memberships in two social categories — `illicit amphetamine user' and `ADHD patient'. We analyse interviews with four drug-dependent indivi…
You gotta light
“If a girl doesn't say ‘no’…”
Most psychological theories of rape tend to stress factors internal to both rapists and their victims in accounting for the phenomenon. Unlike such theories, social psychological and feminist accounts have drawn attention to social and cultural factors as productive of rape, and have criticized psychological accounts on the grounds that they often serve, paradoxically, to cement pre‐existing ‘common‐sense’. In this paper we examine the ways in wh…
Clarifying the Point
This is a short response to a particular point made by our colleagues Wes Sharrock and Jeff Coulter in their otherwise convincing and devastating critique of the ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) avatar of cognitivism. We think they may have misunderstood what we once said about the use of ‘mental predicates’ and wish to clarify the point in question
You Couldn't Say “No”, Could You?’
While several psychological theories of rape have been developed, Tannen's ‘ miscommunication’ model is dominant, informing ‘expert’ and popular accounts alike. Rape is constructed as an extreme example of miscommunication – whereby women's ‘failure’ to say ‘no’ is interpreted by men as sexual consent. Kitzinger and Frith have demonstrated that young women have an implicit understanding of the normative interactional structure of refusal, and it …
Re-presenting Culture and the Self
We try to show that the fundamental grounds of psychological thinking about the domains of ‘culture’ and ‘the self’ (and their possible connections) are necessarily representationalist in the Cartesian sense. Rehearsing Heidegger’s critique of representationalism as the basic wrong turning taken by modern thinking generally (and by psychology in particular) with respect to what human being is, we move on to the possibility of a counter-representa…
A case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis
Drawing upon Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, and in the frame of what is currently called discursive psychology, we open up a significant macro-social problem - indeed a global problem - to inspection at a local level by reference to a naturally-occurring instance of talk-in-interaction. The problem is the documented increase in diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in recent years - particularly for …
The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability
Intellectual disability is usually thought of as a form of internal, individual affliction, little different from diabetes, paralysis or chronic illness. This study, the first book-length application of discursive psychology to intellectual disability, shows that what we usually understand as being an individual problem is actually an interactional, or social, product. Through a range of case studies, which draw upon ethnomethodological and conve…
There are orphans in Africa still looking for my hands
This paper explores issues of emotional distress expressed by refugee women from Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea who now live in Western Australia. Qualitative data from interviews and focus groups are used to illustrate differences in understandings of distress, including depression and anxiety, and women's understandings of the causes of, and solutions to, what have been defined by service providers as 'mental health' problems. The finding…
Quality of Life Research
Quality of life research
This introductory text offers a critical overview of the concept of quality of life and the ways in which it is researched
What can psychological terms actually do? (Or)
About a year before the breakdown I was having symptoms
Portrayals of mental illness in the media reportedly highlight violence and crime by the 'mentally ill'. Using a discourse analytic approach we investigated representations of 'depression' in the print media in Australia during the year 2000. Unlike other 'mental illnesses', in the case of depression the media stress the need for the protection of the sufferer, rather than others. Three key discourses are identified - the biomedical, the psycho-s…
Should We Make a Start Then
Starting with Sacks's (1992) conjecture about there being "omni-relevant devices" in specific kinds of conversation (but by no means in all conversation), we subject that conjecture to empirical analysis. To accomplish this, we examine a data fragment taken from a corpus of materials in which "resettled" mental patients are undergoing "quality of life" assessments. Part of the analysis shows how such devices are produced and oriented to in an act…
Self-Glorification and its Others
The question of the relation(s) between sport and everyday life is a fraught one-ranging from traditional claims that sport is a form of escape from everyday life to the view that sport is a deep part of the ontological conditions of being human. In this analysis, the authors offer an alternative position based on the inspection of actual, everyday discursive materials concerning sport and its management. Although high theory might consider the s…
Ghost
After a brief inspection of some cases where people apparently 'mis-identify' others, we draw some initial and tentative conclusions about ways of thinking about 'who people are'. We then move on to look at underlying assumptions in psychology about this very question; with these assumptions considered under the rubric of psychology's 'model of being human'. Locating problems with this model on the basis of its affinity with Kantian thought, we c…
"Brilliant. Next Question. .."
We note interviewers' use, after an answer receipt, of markedly positive assessments (such as "brilliant," "excellent," etc.). They occur in a (permissive) sequence of [answer receipt] + [right/ok token] + [high-grade assessment] + [move to next item] which, we argue, are task-oriented, rather than content-oriented, devices. They signal movement through a series of interactional units: the completion of individual question-answer pairs, interview…
Genocide or a Failure to Gel? Racism, History and Nationalism in Australian Talk
In a context of wide media attention to public debates about the social, political and epistemic entitlements of different groups within Australian society, an understanding of the rhetorical resources and the discursive work doen by differing constructions of `race', has become an important local issue. This article examines data from discussions between two groups of (non-indigenous) university students on a range of contemporary issues concern…
Playing procrustes
The notion of “sense of community” is central to community psychology's conceptual framework. It has been described as the discipline's “overarching value” (Sarason, 1974). Allied to the notion of “sense of community” are other constructsempowerment, representation, solidaritywhich map the empirical concerns of community psychology. Together, these notions make important rhetorical claims about the modus operandi of community psychology in both r…
‘Just an ordinary Australian’
Australia has recently witnessed the resurgence of what has been termed the ‘race debate’. The apparently high levels of popular support from ‘ordinary’ Australians for MP Pauline Hanson's contentious views on immigration, Australia's indigenous peoples and her foreign relations have been a major theme of this debate. This paper employs the framework of discursive psychology to examine, in her maiden speech to Parliament, the way in which Pauline…
Invisible to Themselves or Negotiating Identity? The Interactional Management of 'Being Intellectually Disabled
There seems to be a professional (and perhaps societal) consensus that the identity label of 'intellectual disabled' is an aversive, even 'toxic' one. Indeed, Todd & Shearn (1995, 1997) have advanced the suggestion that parents' concerns over the toxicity of the label led them to bring up their children in ignorance of their disabilities, and thus produce people who are 'invisible to themselves'. However, drawing on work in discursive psychology,…
Quality of Life' Talk and the Corporatisation of Intellectual Disability
The notion of 'Quality of Life' (QOL) has recently become a key device in the intellectual disability research community. Despite considerable attention to operational definition and issues of measurement, little work has considered the historical and sociopolitical context of the construct. The view that QOL represents an evolution of Wolfensberger's (1972) Principle of Normalisation appears widespread. This paper argues that this view is naive.…
Genocide or a Failure to Gel? Racism, History and Nationalism in Australian Talk
In a context of wide media attention to public debates about the social, political and epistemic entitlements of different groups within Australian society, an understanding of the rhetorical resources and the discursive work doen by differing constructions of `race', has become an important local issue. This article examines data from discussions between two groups of (non-indigenous) university students on a range of contemporary issues concern…
You Couldn't Say “No”, Could You?’
While several psychological theories of rape have been developed, Tannen's ‘ miscommunication’ model is dominant, informing ‘expert’ and popular accounts alike. Rape is constructed as an extreme example of miscommunication – whereby women's ‘failure’ to say ‘no’ is interpreted by men as sexual consent. Kitzinger and Frith have demonstrated that young women have an implicit understanding of the normative interactional structure of refusal, and it …
Quality of Life' Talk
The new discourse of `quality of life' is highly consequential for those whose lives are regulated by medical and psychological services, but at the heart of it there is a paradox. On the one hand, psychologists are committed to assessing the wellbeing of their clients; on the other hand, their theorization of `quality of life' and their diagnostic interview procedures cordon off its official definition from ordinary usages. This paper explores h…
You gotta light
Invisible to Themselves or Negotiating Identity? The Interactional Management of 'Being Intellectually Disabled
There seems to be a professional (and perhaps societal) consensus that the identity label of 'intellectual disabled' is an aversive, even 'toxic' one. Indeed, Todd & Shearn (1995, 1997) have advanced the suggestion that parents' concerns over the toxicity of the label led them to bring up their children in ignorance of their disabilities, and thus produce people who are 'invisible to themselves'. However, drawing on work in discursive psychology,…
A case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis
Drawing upon Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, and in the frame of what is currently called discursive psychology, we open up a significant macro-social problem - indeed a global problem - to inspection at a local level by reference to a naturally-occurring instance of talk-in-interaction. The problem is the documented increase in diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in recent years - particularly for …
About a year before the breakdown I was having symptoms
Portrayals of mental illness in the media reportedly highlight violence and crime by the 'mentally ill'. Using a discourse analytic approach we investigated representations of 'depression' in the print media in Australia during the year 2000. Unlike other 'mental illnesses', in the case of depression the media stress the need for the protection of the sufferer, rather than others. Three key discourses are identified - the biomedical, the psycho-s…
ADHD patient' or `illicit drug user'? Managing medico-moral membership categories in drug dependence services
Amphetamine-dependent patients seeking treatment are diagnosed with ADHD at a significantly higher rate than members of the general population. To study this relationship as it is constructed in everyday life, we draw on membership categorization analysis to examine how individuals account for their candidate memberships in two social categories — `illicit amphetamine user' and `ADHD patient'. We analyse interviews with four drug-dependent indivi…
Real Italians and wogs’
We explore the discursive construction of Italian identity among a bilingual sample of Italian‐born Western Australians. Focus groups were held with two groups: Italians who had migrated to Australia as children and a group who had migrated as adults. We found intra‐ and inter‐individual differences in identity construction, with much discourse devoted to demonstrating Italian authenticity and negotiating ethnic category boundaries. Shared marker…
Should We Make a Start Then
Starting with Sacks's (1992) conjecture about there being "omni-relevant devices" in specific kinds of conversation (but by no means in all conversation), we subject that conjecture to empirical analysis. To accomplish this, we examine a data fragment taken from a corpus of materials in which "resettled" mental patients are undergoing "quality of life" assessments. Part of the analysis shows how such devices are produced and oriented to in an act…
Quality of Life' Talk and the Corporatisation of Intellectual Disability
The notion of 'Quality of Life' (QOL) has recently become a key device in the intellectual disability research community. Despite considerable attention to operational definition and issues of measurement, little work has considered the historical and sociopolitical context of the construct. The view that QOL represents an evolution of Wolfensberger's (1972) Principle of Normalisation appears widespread. This paper argues that this view is naive.…
There are orphans in Africa still looking for my hands
This paper explores issues of emotional distress expressed by refugee women from Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea who now live in Western Australia. Qualitative data from interviews and focus groups are used to illustrate differences in understandings of distress, including depression and anxiety, and women's understandings of the causes of, and solutions to, what have been defined by service providers as 'mental health' problems. The finding…
What can psychological terms actually do? (Or)
Ghost
After a brief inspection of some cases where people apparently 'mis-identify' others, we draw some initial and tentative conclusions about ways of thinking about 'who people are'. We then move on to look at underlying assumptions in psychology about this very question; with these assumptions considered under the rubric of psychology's 'model of being human'. Locating problems with this model on the basis of its affinity with Kantian thought, we c…
The Meaning of Coping for Psychiatric Patients
Contemporary psychiatric theory holds that a precipitant of major mental illness is the inability of some vulnerable individuals to cope with the difficulties of everyday life. Such mentally ill people are characterized as having deficient, dysfunctional, or absent coping skills. Recently, researchers have exerted considerable effort to distinguish between productive and nonproductive coping. In this article, we argue that not only are such conce…
Normalisation — Metatheory or metaphysics? A conceptual critique
Normalisation is recognised to be an influential human service paradigm. Its best known proponent, Wolfenberger, maintains that it is both a self-evidently valid human service ideology and also a “research-anchored” scientific theory (Wolfensberger, 1980). Critics have cast doubts upon both of these claims. The scientific status of normalisation has yet to be clarified. A critical analysis of Wolfenberger's formulation reveals that the core state…
A Conversation Analysis of the ‘Acquiescence’ of People with Learning Disabilities
Contrary to received wisdom, ‘acquiescence bias’ in the responses of people with learning disabilities to questioning is not a simple phenomenon, and certainly not one to be laid at the door solely of people with learning disabilities themselves. Rather, it is probably an artefact of the conversational organization of interviews as tests. Analysis of Quality of Life assessment interviews show, we argue, that there is probably no uniform ‘acquiesc…
Quality of Life' Talk
The new discourse of `quality of life' is highly consequential for those whose lives are regulated by medical and psychological services, but at the heart of it there is a paradox. On the one hand, psychologists are committed to assessing the wellbeing of their clients; on the other hand, their theorization of `quality of life' and their diagnostic interview procedures cordon off its official definition from ordinary usages. This paper explores h…
‘Just an ordinary Australian’
Australia has recently witnessed the resurgence of what has been termed the ‘race debate’. The apparently high levels of popular support from ‘ordinary’ Australians for MP Pauline Hanson's contentious views on immigration, Australia's indigenous peoples and her foreign relations have been a major theme of this debate. This paper employs the framework of discursive psychology to examine, in her maiden speech to Parliament, the way in which Pauline…
Invisible to Themselves or Negotiating Identity? The Interactional Management of 'Being Intellectually Disabled
There seems to be a professional (and perhaps societal) consensus that the identity label of 'intellectual disabled' is an aversive, even 'toxic' one. Indeed, Todd & Shearn (1995, 1997) have advanced the suggestion that parents' concerns over the toxicity of the label led them to bring up their children in ignorance of their disabilities, and thus produce people who are 'invisible to themselves'. However, drawing on work in discursive psychology,…
Quality of Life' Talk and the Corporatisation of Intellectual Disability
The notion of 'Quality of Life' (QOL) has recently become a key device in the intellectual disability research community. Despite considerable attention to operational definition and issues of measurement, little work has considered the historical and sociopolitical context of the construct. The view that QOL represents an evolution of Wolfensberger's (1972) Principle of Normalisation appears widespread. This paper argues that this view is naive.…
Genocide or a Failure to Gel? Racism, History and Nationalism in Australian Talk
In a context of wide media attention to public debates about the social, political and epistemic entitlements of different groups within Australian society, an understanding of the rhetorical resources and the discursive work doen by differing constructions of `race', has become an important local issue. This article examines data from discussions between two groups of (non-indigenous) university students on a range of contemporary issues concern…
Playing procrustes
The notion of “sense of community” is central to community psychology's conceptual framework. It has been described as the discipline's “overarching value” (Sarason, 1974). Allied to the notion of “sense of community” are other constructsempowerment, representation, solidaritywhich map the empirical concerns of community psychology. Together, these notions make important rhetorical claims about the modus operandi of community psychology in both r…
"Brilliant. Next Question. .."
We note interviewers' use, after an answer receipt, of markedly positive assessments (such as "brilliant," "excellent," etc.). They occur in a (permissive) sequence of [answer receipt] + [right/ok token] + [high-grade assessment] + [move to next item] which, we argue, are task-oriented, rather than content-oriented, devices. They signal movement through a series of interactional units: the completion of individual question-answer pairs, interview…
Ghost
After a brief inspection of some cases where people apparently 'mis-identify' others, we draw some initial and tentative conclusions about ways of thinking about 'who people are'. We then move on to look at underlying assumptions in psychology about this very question; with these assumptions considered under the rubric of psychology's 'model of being human'. Locating problems with this model on the basis of its affinity with Kantian thought, we c…
Should We Make a Start Then
Starting with Sacks's (1992) conjecture about there being "omni-relevant devices" in specific kinds of conversation (but by no means in all conversation), we subject that conjecture to empirical analysis. To accomplish this, we examine a data fragment taken from a corpus of materials in which "resettled" mental patients are undergoing "quality of life" assessments. Part of the analysis shows how such devices are produced and oriented to in an act…
Self-Glorification and its Others
The question of the relation(s) between sport and everyday life is a fraught one-ranging from traditional claims that sport is a form of escape from everyday life to the view that sport is a deep part of the ontological conditions of being human. In this analysis, the authors offer an alternative position based on the inspection of actual, everyday discursive materials concerning sport and its management. Although high theory might consider the s…
Quality of Life Research
Quality of life research
This introductory text offers a critical overview of the concept of quality of life and the ways in which it is researched
What can psychological terms actually do? (Or)
About a year before the breakdown I was having symptoms
Portrayals of mental illness in the media reportedly highlight violence and crime by the 'mentally ill'. Using a discourse analytic approach we investigated representations of 'depression' in the print media in Australia during the year 2000. Unlike other 'mental illnesses', in the case of depression the media stress the need for the protection of the sufferer, rather than others. Three key discourses are identified - the biomedical, the psycho-s…
The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability
Intellectual disability is usually thought of as a form of internal, individual affliction, little different from diabetes, paralysis or chronic illness. This study, the first book-length application of discursive psychology to intellectual disability, shows that what we usually understand as being an individual problem is actually an interactional, or social, product. Through a range of case studies, which draw upon ethnomethodological and conve…
There are orphans in Africa still looking for my hands
This paper explores issues of emotional distress expressed by refugee women from Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea who now live in Western Australia. Qualitative data from interviews and focus groups are used to illustrate differences in understandings of distress, including depression and anxiety, and women's understandings of the causes of, and solutions to, what have been defined by service providers as 'mental health' problems. The finding…
Re-presenting Culture and the Self
We try to show that the fundamental grounds of psychological thinking about the domains of ‘culture’ and ‘the self’ (and their possible connections) are necessarily representationalist in the Cartesian sense. Rehearsing Heidegger’s critique of representationalism as the basic wrong turning taken by modern thinking generally (and by psychology in particular) with respect to what human being is, we move on to the possibility of a counter-representa…
A case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis
Drawing upon Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, and in the frame of what is currently called discursive psychology, we open up a significant macro-social problem - indeed a global problem - to inspection at a local level by reference to a naturally-occurring instance of talk-in-interaction. The problem is the documented increase in diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in recent years - particularly for …
Clarifying the Point
This is a short response to a particular point made by our colleagues Wes Sharrock and Jeff Coulter in their otherwise convincing and devastating critique of the ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) avatar of cognitivism. We think they may have misunderstood what we once said about the use of ‘mental predicates’ and wish to clarify the point in question
You Couldn't Say “No”, Could You?’
While several psychological theories of rape have been developed, Tannen's ‘ miscommunication’ model is dominant, informing ‘expert’ and popular accounts alike. Rape is constructed as an extreme example of miscommunication – whereby women's ‘failure’ to say ‘no’ is interpreted by men as sexual consent. Kitzinger and Frith have demonstrated that young women have an implicit understanding of the normative interactional structure of refusal, and it …
“If a girl doesn't say ‘no’…”
Most psychological theories of rape tend to stress factors internal to both rapists and their victims in accounting for the phenomenon. Unlike such theories, social psychological and feminist accounts have drawn attention to social and cultural factors as productive of rape, and have criticized psychological accounts on the grounds that they often serve, paradoxically, to cement pre‐existing ‘common‐sense’. In this paper we examine the ways in wh…
You gotta light
Real Italians and wogs’
We explore the discursive construction of Italian identity among a bilingual sample of Italian‐born Western Australians. Focus groups were held with two groups: Italians who had migrated to Australia as children and a group who had migrated as adults. We found intra‐ and inter‐individual differences in identity construction, with much discourse devoted to demonstrating Italian authenticity and negotiating ethnic category boundaries. Shared marker…
Psychology (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (14 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Conversation (7 works) · Law (7 works)