Conversation analysis of 53 emotive responses to troubles tellings on a peer support line discovered eight different methods for expressing empathy and/or sympathy. Emotive reactions, assessments, and formulating the gist of the trouble typically occur early on in a troubles telling. Reporting one’s own reaction was found in the midst of troubles telling, as a second reaction to ‘bad’ news or after callers’ reports of their own feelings. Naming another’s feelings and using an idiom occur towards the end of a (...) troubles telling. Sharing a similar experience of similar feelings and expressing one’s feelings were used in various places within a troubles telling and conveyed more than basic concern about the callers’ feelings. These and other differences between methods further detail the various ways support providers and recipients perform empathy and/or sympathy in situ. (shrink)

When callers to a warm line report on good news tied to a current or ongoing problem, call takers use four different methods to endorse this good news and encourage actions implied within the report. Building upon 93 potentially encouraging responses in 65 actual warm line calls, this study describes four different methods of encouragement used by call takers within news delivery sequences: 1) positive assessments; 2) assessments plus formulations; 3) statements of agreement to a planned action; and 4) second (...) assessments. Across these methods, call takers must do more than what is minimally required as a response in order to encourage and endorse good news. (shrink)

This study, by means of conversation analysis, comprehensively illuminates the advisee’s acceptance of advice in Chinese phone-in counseling for family problems from the perspective of Epistemics, and reveals advisee’s type of management of the epistemic status relationship as well as the epistemic stances during executing the management. The study finds that the advisee tacitly approved of the asymmetric relationship of epistemic status between an adviser and himself/herself when accepting advice; that this type of relationship management can be executed through four (...) kinds of epistemic stances; that these stances actually reflect the advisee’s positioning of asymmetric relationship of knowledge distribution of both parties. This study investigates the acceptance of advice from the perspective of Epistemics, which can extend the theoretical perspective of the researches on responses to advice and give new illumination of the advisory interaction. (shrink)

In this article we investigate the nature of problem presentation and responses on an online forum for young people who self-harm. Previous studies have raised concerns about the peer encouragement of self-harming behaviours in online forums, and this analysis considers the nature of peer interaction on a specific forum, ‘ SharpTalk’. This was a research forum which explored the potential of online communities to foster engagement and shared learning between NHS professionals and young people who self-harm. This analysis draws on (...) conversation analysis methods to study problem presentation and responses, and nature of advice given. Analysis highlighted both the tendency to offer advice where it was not asked for, and the mundane ‘safe’ nature of advice. This awareness of how young people interact and provide support online is important for those setting up online interventions to support young people who self-harm. (shrink)

Much of the research on the delivery of advice by professionals such as physicians, health workers and counsellors, both on the telephone and in face-to-face interaction more generally, has focused on the theme of client resistance and the consequent need for professionals to adopt particular formats to assist in the uptake of the advice. In this article we consider one setting, Kid’s Helpline, the national Australian counselling service for children and young people, where there is an institutional mandate not to (...) give explicit advice in accordance with the values of self-direction and empowerment. The article examines one practice, the use of script proposals by counsellors, which appears to offer a way of providing support which is consistent with these values. Script proposals entail the counsellors packaging their advice as something that the caller might say — at some future time — to a third party such as a friend, teacher, parent or partner, and involve the counsellor adopting the speaking position of the caller in what appears as a rehearsal of a forthcoming strip of interaction. Although the core feature of a script proposal is the counsellor’s use of direct reported speech, they appear to be delivered not so much as exact words to be followed, but as the type of conversation that the client needs to have with the third party. Script proposals, in short, provide models of what to say as well as alluding to how these could be emulated by the client. In their design, script proposals invariably incorporate one or more of the most common rhetorical formats for maximizing the persuasive force of an utterance such as a three-part list or a contrastive pair. Script proposals, moreover, stand in a complex relation to the prior talk and one of their functions appears to be to summarize, respecify or expand upon the client’s own ideas or suggestions for problem solving that have emerged in these preceding sequences. (shrink)

Work on advice has concentrated on institutional settings where there are restrictions on roles, actions and their organisation. This article focuses on advice giving in mundane settings: interactions between mothers and their young-adult daughters in a corpus of 51 telephone calls. Analysis reveals a range of designs that can be ‘advice implicative’ including advice-implicative interrogatives and advice-implicative assessments. Recipients orient to the characteristic features these implicit forms share with more explicit advice: normative pressure on the recipient’s conduct and epistemic asymmetry (...) between advisor and advisee. Advice-implicative actions orient to contingencies on the recipient’s ability or willingness to perform the target action. They also display varying degrees of entitlement over the recipient’s performance of the target action. Manipulating contingency and entitlement can soften or heighten both the normative thrust and the knowledge asymmetry of the advice giving. This analysis further discusses the distinction between the practices of advising, directing and requesting, and allows consideration of how action design connects to relationality between parties. (shrink)