C Antaki
Biographic Data
| ID | 8432 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Antaki |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Antaki |
| SIGNATURE | ANTAKI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loughborough University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9473-4413 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 492 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Conversation Analysis and Identity in Interaction
The perspective of conversation analysis (CA) on identities can be described as social constructionist and non‐essentialist.
The softness of hard data: Discursive psychology, conversation analysis, and psychological science
Qualitative methods are sometimes criticized on the grounds that they do not provide “hard” data. However, on inspection, hard data turn out to be produced by unavoidably “soft” human interaction and activities. That means that psychologists must work directly with what people do and say and either transform it into abstractions—with potential distortions along the way—or stay with the raw events to see what questions they may answer. We argue fo…
Intervening with care: Interactional practices for navigating authority in supervised contact visits
Research on supervised contact visits between children placed in care and their birth parents highlights the need for professional skills in facilitating these encounters. While most studies focus on visit frequency and location, less attention has been given to the interactional dilemmas supervisors face when supporting parents and fostering the parent-child relationship while safeguarding the child. This article examines two instances of superv…
The Ethics of Collecting, Curating, and Sharing Data in Conversation Analysis
A foundational principle of ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic (EM/CA) research is that if people’s interactions with one another are to be studied, they must be recorded as faithfully and as fully as possible. In practice, this principle throws up ethical challenges at every stage of a typical EM/CA study: negotiating access to the scene; recruiting stakeholders and participants; soliciting their informed consent and attending to thei…
How diabetes forum-users complain about others’ expectations: Troubles-telling and troubles-receiving
This article offers a qualitative analysis of two instances of troubles-telling threads on a diabetes forum, with a specific focus on how these instances contribute to constructing a way to manage others’ expectations concerning how persons diagnosed with diabetes control their condition. From the perspective of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this article shows some recurrent features of both troubles-telling (namely announcemen…
A Gradient of More and Less Demanding Impositions: Reflections on the Special Issue on Resistance
People resist various kinds of imposition, which can be ranged along a gradient—impositions from those heavily entitled to make them, along to those where the matter is more balanced, to where the imposed-upon person is the one who has the greater rights. The articles in this Special Issue cover the whole range, from the police officer issuing bald imperatives, through to a tutor trying to help a student with their essay. In one case the resistor…
How professionals deal with clients’ explicit objections to their advice
Previous literature on advice-resistance in medicine and welfare has tended to focus on patients’ or callers’ inexplicit resistance (minimal responses, silence and so on). But clients also raise explicit objections, which put up a firmer barrier against the advisor’s efforts. In a novel look at resistance, we show that one important distinction among objections is their epistemic domain: whether the client’s objection is in their own world (e.g. …
Advising without personalising: How a Helpline May Satisfy Callers Without Giving Medical Advice Beyond Its Remit
Callers to telephone helplines often seek advice beyond the authorisation of those staffing the service. On health helplines, this poses a problem to the call-taker. How do they manage the dilemma between, on the one hand, exceeding their competence and authority to give medical advice, and, on the other, leaving the caller unsatisfied with the service? We offer a framework in which to set newly identified practices along with those identified in…
Establishing Intellectually Impaired Victims’ Understanding about ‘Truth’ and ‘Lies’: Police Interview Guidance and Practice in Cases of Sexual Assault
Effective police interviews are central to the justice process for sexual assault victims, but little is known about either actual communication between police officers and witnesses or the alignment between guidance and real practice. This study investigated how police officers, in formal interviews, follow ‘best evidence’ guidance to obtain victims’ demonstrable understandings of ‘truth and lies’. We conducted qualitative conversation analysis …
The Pivot Point between Problem Presentation and Advice in a Health Helpline Service
This article examines interactions between callers to a health helpline and specialist nurses. Helpline call-takers must judge the appropriate moment to move from listening to the caller's problem to offering them the appropriate service. In a study of Parkinson's UK nurse call-takers, we find that the pivot is the point at which the caller reports the upshot of their trouble in terms of an impact on their daily life. Indeed, if the caller seems …
When the larger objective matters more: Support Workers' Epistemic and Deontic Authority Over Adult Service-Users
We report on how support workers sometimes over-ride the wishes of people living with cognitive impairments. This can happen when they are both involved in some project (such as an institutionally-managed game, a physical journey, an educational activity and so on). The support worker might use their deontic authority (to propose, decide or announce future actions) to do things that advance the over-arching project, in spite of proposals for what…
Conversation Analysis at the fair
The authors of the ‘Conversational Rollercoaster’ article give a vivid and engaging account of a difficult but worthwhile exercise: bringing live Conversation Analysis (CA) to the public in a Science Fair. Part of their motivation is a claim that CA is uniquely qualified for such exhibition: as a mode of enquiry, it has what they call a ‘public ethos’. I examine that part of their case and suggest that it might not be as waterproof as it appears.…
When police treat straightforward answers as uncooperative
How adults with a profound intellectual disability engage others in interaction
Using video records of everyday life in a residential home, we report on what interactional practices are used by people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities to initiate encounters. There were very few initiations, and all presented difficulties to the interlocutor (support staff; the recording researcher); one (which we call 'blank recipiency') gave the interlocutor virtually no information at all on which to base a response. Only …
Conversational practices promoting a discourse of agency for adults with intellectual disabilities
In a qualitative study of 50 hours of videotapes of interactions between staff and adults with intellectual disabilities, in two different service environments, we identified conversational practices that arguably promoted – or failed to promote – a discourse of service-users’ personal agency in how they carried out everyday activities. Staff could treat the service-user as an autonomous, self-directed social individual by (a) casting the activit…
Dealing with the distress of people with intellectual disabilities reporting sexual assault and rape
When police officers interview people with intellectual disabilities who allege sexual assault and rape, they must establish rapport with the interviewee but deal with their distress in a way that does not compromise the interview’s impartiality and its acceptability in court. Inspection of 19 videotaped interviews from an English police force’s records reveals that the officers deal with expressed distress by choosing among three practices: mini…
Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: Probing inconsistency and questioning conduct
Reporting sexual assault to the authorities is fraught with difficulties, and these are compounded when the complainant is hindered by an intellectual disability (ID). In a study of 19 U.K. police interviews with complainants with ID alleging sexual assault and rape, we found that most interviewing officers on occasion pursued lines of questioning which not only probed inconsistencies (which is mandated by their guidelines), but implicitly questi…
Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: Putting the worse option last
Recipient-side test questions
Standard test questions allow the questioner to confirm an answer as correct, displaying their greater epistemic authority over the answerer (as in the canonical case of the classroom, where the teacher knows more than the pupil). But the instructional power of test questions may prompt their use even when that asymmetry is neutralized or reversed, and the recipient ought to know as much as, or indeed more than, the questioner. I describe how (an…
Either/or questions in child psychiatric assessments: The effect of the seriousness and order of the alternatives
Mental health practitioners, assessing children for possible psychiatric conditions, need to probe sensitive matters. We examine practitioners' use of questions which try to clarify a given issue by offering alternative descriptions of how things are: one bland, and the other clearly undesirable in some way. The undesirable states of affairs can be described in serious terms (e.g. the child wanting to kill themselves) or, while still undesirable,…
To vaccinate or not? The disqualification of commercial sources of health advice in an online forum
Public health debates in online forums allow the emergence of ordinary practical reasoning about 'official' health information. We used a Discursive Psychology approach to analyse postings in a forum devoted to the discussion of the H1N1 (Swine flu) virus. We identify the discursive practices that contributors use to valorize certain elements in the debate (what they cast as science, rationality and 'proper' scepticism) over others (especially co…
Affiliative and disaffiliative candidate understandings
A listener can offer an interpretation (can give a ‘candidate understanding’) of what a speaker is currently saying. I distinguish between, on the one hand, proposing a candidate understanding that solves a manifest problem by offering new, relevant information; and, on the other hand, proposing a candidate understanding that does not seem to relate to any obvious obscurity in what the speaker is saying, and only offers material that the speaker …
What actions mean, to whom, and when
In a critique of Conversation Analysis’ treatment of context, Waring, Creider, Tarpey and Black invite us to see that, when understanding some stretch of interaction, speakers’ retrospective reports might be helpful. Two standard responses to Waring et al.’s argument are that 1) people’s personal accounts of contingent and fleeting moments of interaction are of a different order of event from the actions they produce in situ, and are matters of a…
Telling people what to do (and, sometimes, why): Contingency, entitlement and explanation in staff requests to adults with intellectual impairments
Social Support and Unsolicited Advice in a Bipolar Disorder Online Forum
How does a newly diagnosed user get inducted into a forum dedicated to people suffering from bipolar disorder? Is their opening message "matched" by the forum's reply? We add to the literature on social support online by using conversation analysis (CA) to explore an apparent contradiction between a new user's first post and forum members' replies with ostensibly unsolicited advice. CA reveals the intimate relation between turns in sequence, an a…
Telling people what to do (and, sometimes, why): Contingency, entitlement and explanation in staff requests to adults with intellectual impairments
Diagnostic formulations in psychotherapy
Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the client's talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the client's circumstances. But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer interpretations. We offer an analysis of formulations (both of the gist of the client's words and of their implications) that are diagnostic: that is, used by the professional to sharpen, clarify or refin…
Show Concessions
Making a show of conceding by using a three-part structure of proposition, concession and reassertion has the effect - in contrast to other ways of conceding - of strengthening one's own position at the expense of a counter-argument. This three-part structure can be also exploited so as to carry the battle to the enemy, as it were, and make the concession do more offensive work. We detail three such ways: Trojan Horses where the speaker imports a…
For she who knows who she is: Managing Accountability in Online Forum Messages
The recent application of Conversation Analysis (CA) to online forum communication has been successful in explicating the sequential ties among messages. In this article, we build on those foundations and show how CA’s illumination of the structural resources of interaction can provide an analysis of accountable action in an online forum setting. We report a case study to illustrate how a user, in carrying off a ‘declaration of love,’ attends to …
Creating Happy People by Asking Yes-No Questions
(1997). Creating Happy People by Asking Yes-No Questions. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 285-313
Social Support and Unsolicited Advice in a Bipolar Disorder Online Forum
How does a newly diagnosed user get inducted into a forum dedicated to people suffering from bipolar disorder? Is their opening message "matched" by the forum's reply? We add to the literature on social support online by using conversation analysis (CA) to explore an apparent contradiction between a new user's first post and forum members' replies with ostensibly unsolicited advice. CA reveals the intimate relation between turns in sequence, an a…
Affiliative and disaffiliative candidate understandings
A listener can offer an interpretation (can give a ‘candidate understanding’) of what a speaker is currently saying. I distinguish between, on the one hand, proposing a candidate understanding that solves a manifest problem by offering new, relevant information; and, on the other hand, proposing a candidate understanding that does not seem to relate to any obvious obscurity in what the speaker is saying, and only offers material that the speaker …
Quality of Life' Talk: The Liberal Paradox of Psychological Testing
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…
Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: Putting the worse option last
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,…
Lovely: Turn-Initial High-Grade Assessments in Telephone Closings
Do high-grade assessments (such as “lovely” and “brilliant”) have a use in marking episodes in mundane conversation? Inspection suggests that closing sequences in telephone conversations, when they include such embedded actions as making arrangements, have a slot which can be filled by a turn-initial high-grade assessment. I suggest that the high-grade assessment makes a special display of resuming a closing which had been suspended. I make a lin…
Promoting choice and control in residential services for people with learning disabilities
This paper discusses the gap between policy goals and practice in residential services for people with learning disabilities. Drawing on a nine month ethnographic study of three residential services, it outlines a range of obstacles to the promotion of choice and control that were routinely observed in the culture and working practices of the services. Issues discussed include conflicting service values and agendas, inspection regimes, an attenti…
Mental-health practitioners' use of idiomatic expressions in summarising clients' accounts
Ordinary explanation in conversation: Causal structures and their defence
It is argued that the social context of ordinary explanations encourages them to be more complex than single attributions, and to be defended by a variety of rhetorical devices. Explanations of personally‐relevant political events were collected from articulate respondents in a setting allowing conversational freedom. Structural analysis showed that single‐cause explanations were rare. Modestly elaborate causal networks were used, and personal, g…
Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: Probing inconsistency and questioning conduct
Reporting sexual assault to the authorities is fraught with difficulties, and these are compounded when the complainant is hindered by an intellectual disability (ID). In a study of 19 U.K. police interviews with complainants with ID alleging sexual assault and rape, we found that most interviewing officers on occasion pursued lines of questioning which not only probed inconsistencies (which is mandated by their guidelines), but implicitly questi…
Interviewing Persons with a Learning Disability: How Setting Lower Standards May Inflate Well-Being Scores
To be psychometrically valid, standard questions are meant to be delivered as they appear on the interview schedule-or by nonleading paraphrase-and the respondents' answers exactly recorded. Yet, inspection of a set of transcripts of quality-of-life assessments of people with a learning disability (in North American terminology, mental retardation) shows massive deviation from this ideal. What is unsurprising is that interviewers frequently edit …
How proposing an activity to a person with an intellectual disability can imply a limited identity
In residential homes for people with learning or intellectual disabilities (or mental retardation, in North American usage), a routine way for staff members to structure residents' time is to propose outside activities (e.g. shopping trips to town, attendance at a concert and so on). We identify one common way of proposing such activities that reveals a subtle but significant aspect of the staff's understanding of the residents' identities. Staff…
Producing a ‘cognition
Many professional assessment devices (questionnaires, interview schedules and so on) are designed to harvest informants’ cognitions as stable, internally-represented, information-processed conceptions of the world. If one dissents from this notion of what beliefs, knowledge and opinions are, then one is freer to see how they are produced, in interaction, as artefacts that serve some interactional (and, in the case of the interview I consider here…
Shaping Clients' Answers: Departures from neutrality in care-staff interviews with people with a learning disability
This is restricted access. This article was published in the journal, Disability and Society [© Taylor and Francis] and is available online at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09687599.asp
When police treat straightforward answers as uncooperative
Saying no to the staff: An Analysis of Refusals in a Home for People With Severe Communication Difficulties
People with severe communication difficulties may attempt to exercise control over their lives by verbally or non-verbally refusing an activity proposed by supporters. We detail examples in which such refusals are treated by care home staff as a temporary reluctance, warranting further attempts to persuade the individual to co-operate. We identify the following conversational (and bodily) practices by which staff achieve their institutional ends:…
"Using Identity Ascription to Disqualify a Rival Version of Events as "Interested
The central point of this article is to show how identity ascription can work to do a very specific job-to be a "disqualifier." It can disqualify a listener's apparent claims on a story one is telling, or a version of events one is offering. If the story recipient or version recipient discharges his or her obligations as a listener inappropriately, then the speaker's ownership and authority over the events might be threatened. We examine a case i…
Using completion to formulate a statement collectively
How professionals deal with clients’ explicit objections to their advice
Previous literature on advice-resistance in medicine and welfare has tended to focus on patients’ or callers’ inexplicit resistance (minimal responses, silence and so on). But clients also raise explicit objections, which put up a firmer barrier against the advisor’s efforts. In a novel look at resistance, we show that one important distinction among objections is their epistemic domain: whether the client’s objection is in their own world (e.g. …
Ordinary explanation in conversation: Causal structures and their defence
It is argued that the social context of ordinary explanations encourages them to be more complex than single attributions, and to be defended by a variety of rhetorical devices. Explanations of personally‐relevant political events were collected from articulate respondents in a setting allowing conversational freedom. Structural analysis showed that single‐cause explanations were rare. Modestly elaborate causal networks were used, and personal, g…
The Effectiveness of the “Tufty Club” in Road Safety Education
S ummary . Tufty Clubs are the main educational intervention made by road safety officers to educate primary school children in the dangers of pedestrian accidents. The effectiveness of Tufty Clubs was assessed by testing 186 5‐year‐old children on road safety knowledge both in the middle of their first school year and again at its end. Children from schools with Tufty Clubs were no better at either test, nor was there any sign of an interaction …
Structured Causal Beliefs and Their Defence in Accounts of Student Political Action
It is argued that an explanation can be thought of as a structure of causal beliefs, each of which can be defended by the explainer. A method for get ting respondents to show how they organise and defend their causal explanations is described. Using the method, a study of explanations of a vivid event in local campus politics is reported. Differences in the explanations of groups of respon dents were only discovered when a full structural measure…
Claim-Backing and Other Explanatory Genres in Talk
How do explanations appear in conversation? We distinguish claimbacking from more familiar social psychology genres of ordinary explanation (causal attribution, reason-giving, excuse and justification). Claim-backing is the use of explanations to warrant the truth of what one has said, or the way one has said it. The way that people back claims reveals the mutual knowledge on which their appeals succeed and fail. We examine people's use of logica…
Attributionstheorie und soziale Erklärungen
Explaining in conversation: Towards an argument model
We examine the proposition that, in ordinary conversation, people are concerned to argue — to justify their claims and to counter potential and actual counter claims. We test out the proposition by analysing explanations in one particular conversation. We attend to the validity claims of what the speakers say, and to the authority with which they say it. Viewed in that light, we find that the majority of what might look like causal attributions t…
Social identities in talk: Speakers' own orientations
What happens if one treats social identity as a flexible resource in conversational interaction? Close attention to the sequencing of talk suggests that speakers' identities are much more subtle than simple pre‐given category labels suggest, and that they change rapidly as a function of the ephemeral (but socially consequential) demands of the situation. Were a psychologist to have sampled the interaction only at one given point, they would have …
Backing Footing
Potter (1996) makes many interesting comments on our paper. Unfortunately we cannot address them all in detail and we therefore focus on four points which we consider focal and of interest to the readers. According to Potter, we are too swift in our dismissal of the treatment of footing in discourse-analytic work; we hold a naively realist account of footing; we adopt too finicky a notion of context; and finally we are halfhearted in our apprecia…
Discourse Participation, Reported Speech and Research Practices in Social Psychology
Recent moves in psychology to use people's talk as data have been highly productive, but we should look carefully at the way the context of such talk is reproduced when the research is published. It can easily be shown how context is stripped out of reports of experiments and questionnaire studies, but we argue that even discursive analyses risk systematically underestimating the dialogicality of people's talk, and hiding the researchers' part in…
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 Liberal Paradox of Psychological Testing
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…
Keeping your footing: Conversational completion in three-part sequences
Using completion to formulate a statement collectively
Creating Happy People by Asking Yes-No Questions
(1997). Creating Happy People by Asking Yes-No Questions. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 285-313
Confrontation Talk: Arguments, Asymmetries and Power on Talk Radio
Contents: Series Editors' Preface. Talk Radio and the Discourse of Argument. Analyzing Argument. Arguments, Agendas and Asymmetries. The Pursuit of Controversy. The Uses of Interruption. Endings and Outcomes. Conclusion
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,…
Show Concessions
Making a show of conceding by using a three-part structure of proposition, concession and reassertion has the effect - in contrast to other ways of conceding - of strengthening one's own position at the expense of a counter-argument. This three-part structure can be also exploited so as to carry the battle to the enemy, as it were, and make the concession do more offensive work. We detail three such ways: Trojan Horses where the speaker imports a…
Interviewing Persons with a Learning Disability: How Setting Lower Standards May Inflate Well-Being Scores
To be psychometrically valid, standard questions are meant to be delivered as they appear on the interview schedule-or by nonleading paraphrase-and the respondents' answers exactly recorded. Yet, inspection of a set of transcripts of quality-of-life assessments of people with a learning disability (in North American terminology, mental retardation) shows massive deviation from this ideal. What is unsurprising is that interviewers frequently edit …
"Brilliant. Next Question. ..": High-Grade Assessment Sequences in the Completion of Interactional Units
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…
"Using Identity Ascription to Disqualify a Rival Version of Events as "Interested
The central point of this article is to show how identity ascription can work to do a very specific job-to be a "disqualifier." It can disqualify a listener's apparent claims on a story one is telling, or a version of events one is offering. If the story recipient or version recipient discharges his or her obligations as a listener inappropriately, then the speaker's ownership and authority over the events might be threatened. We examine a case i…
Identities in Talk
D'You Like a Drink then Do You: Dissembling Language and the Construction of an Impoverished Life
Peter Robinson's abiding interests in language, the categorization of persons, and the use and abuse of truth motivate this study of interviewer practice. Using data from a psychological assessment interview, the author makes the argument that when interviewers edit scripts, they do so in ways that make plain their understandings of their respondent, and so demonstrate (and perhaps construct) a certain image of the individual in front of them. Wh…
Shaping Clients' Answers: Departures from neutrality in care-staff interviews with people with a learning disability
This is restricted access. This article was published in the journal, Disability and Society [© Taylor and Francis] and is available online at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09687599.asp
Personalized revision of 'failed' questions
Lovely: Turn-Initial High-Grade Assessments in Telephone Closings
Do high-grade assessments (such as “lovely” and “brilliant”) have a use in marking episodes in mundane conversation? Inspection suggests that closing sequences in telephone conversations, when they include such embedded actions as making arrangements, have a slot which can be filled by a turn-initial high-grade assessment. I suggest that the high-grade assessment makes a special display of resuming a closing which had been suspended. I make a lin…
Psychology (52 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (48 works) · Social Psychology (40 works) · Political science (34 works) · Computer Science (29 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Conversation (23 works) · Linguistics (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Philosophy (22 works)