Managing Distress, Effecting Empowerment: A Conversation Analytic Case Study of a Call to the Home Birth Helpline

• Authors: Rebecca Shaw , Celia Kitzinger
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

One of the most pressing concerns for many helpline staff is how to manage overt forms of distress and anxiety manifest in ‘troubles talk’, while also encouraging (or ‘empowering’) callers to take action to change the conditions that are creating the distress. Based on an audio-recording of a single call to a Home Birth helpline (drawn from a corpus of 80 such calls), we use conversation analysis to explore how the call-taker negotiates the tension between managing the caller’s distress about her scheduled hospital labour (the ‘presenting problem’), while also encouraging her to arrange a home birth (the ‘problem solution’). We focus on the work the call-taker does to position herself as troubles-talk recipient, while also ensuring that by the end of the encounter the caller has received the information and advice she needs to take action to organise her home birth.

Keywords

EN

compliments; conversation analysis; empowerment; helplines; support work; troubles talk

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: International Review of Social Research
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 7-28

Dates

published

2013-06-01

online

2015-05-06

Contributors

author

Rebecca Shaw

• Institute of Health and Wellbeing University of Glasgow

author

Celia Kitzinger

• Department of Sociology University of York

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/irsr-2013-0008