Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur en för situationen anpassad kommunikationskarta, en pratkarta, kan möjliggöra samtal mellan en 11-årig pojke med autism och utvecklingsstörning och hans mamma när de samtalar om en händelse som inte händer nu. Erik har inget fungerande tal och är beroende av Alternativ och Kompletterande Kommunikation (AKK). Han har sedan förskoletiden en pärm med löstagbara bilder (PECS), som han använder för att uttrycka sina behov och intentioner. I studien undersöktes hur interaktionen mellan Erik och hans mamma Maria organiserades sekventiellt. Analysen visade att en kommunikationskarta, en pratkarta med bilder anpassade för samtalet, var en viktig gemensam resurs för både Maria och Erik för att initiera, utveckla och avsluta pratstunden. Analysen baserades på videoinspelat material i hemmet, inspelat av Maria, där deltagarna pratade om den förestående julhelgen. Samtalsanalys (Conversation Analysis) användes som analysmetod. Det visade sig att deltagarna orienterar mot tre huvudsakliga faser i det kommunikativa projektet att etablera samtal om julen:prefas, huvudfas och postfas. Pratkartan var en viktig kommunikativ resurs för både Maria och Erik, vilken de orienterade mot i alla delar av samtalet. Prefasen bestod av de handlingar som leder fram till att Erik använder PECS-bilder för att involvera sig i samtalet. I prefasen var pratkartan helt avgörande för att Erik skulle komma igång och pecsa. I huvudfasen, den fas där Erik använder PECS-bilder för att samtala om julen, utvecklade Maria och Erik gemensamt olika ämnesaspekter av samtalet. Maria upprepade och utvidgade utifrån Eriks pecsyttranden. Hon gav också värderande bidrag och föreslog nya perspektiv på det pågående ämnet. Erik upprepade, byggde ut och överlappade Marias bidrag, men han kunde också aktivt bibehålla koherens i episoden och följde inte alltid Marias utvidgning eller förslag på nya ämnesaspekter. I postfasen avslutade deltagarna pratstunden och talet om julen. Erik bidrog aktivt till avslutandet genom att plocka ihop pratkartorna. Maria bekräftade både verbalt och genom att använda SLUTA-PRATA-bilden att pratstunden är avslutad. Förslag ges på framtida praktikbaserade studier som kan bidra till evidensbaserad praktik.

As the 2010 Swedish election was closing in, there was a discussion about how the media represented the different party leaders in a differential and unfair manner. This study aims to identify if there were any differences in how four of these party leaders, Lars Ohly, Maud Olofsson, Fredrik Reinfeldt and Mona Sahlin were treated in four individual questioning sessions on Swedish television. Utilizing conversation analysis the study focuses on identifying differences in the usage of interruptions between the four different sessions. The study also analyzes the aggressiveness of the journalists’ questioning and how they designed their questions in the four different sessions. Results show some significant differences in how the four different party leaders were treated in their individual questioning sessions.

Deliberative democracy has been promoted as a way improving legitimacy and political equality in policy debates. This dissertation seeks to understand how deliberation takes place within the intersection of two unique spaces: dialogue among members of regional civil society groups and communication in online fora. The motivation for this research is based on the notion that existing forms of decision-making have contributed to political inequality, a major issue in areas such as the Caribbean. Accordingly I examine the online discussions of three different civil society groups in the Caribbean. I looked at how certain variables in these fora were related to three of the main dimensions of deliberation, the use of reasoned arguments, reciprocity and reflection. With regard to reasoned arguments I examined how diversity among members, the participation of the moderator and the topic and scope of the conversation were pertinent to a discussion in a regional and multi-national setting. For reciprocity I looked at how variables related to time and the posting structure of a conversation were relevant in an online forum. Finally I looked at the strategies that were employed by participants as part of the communication process in an online forum and how these were related to processes of reflection. To address these questions I used a combination of content analysis and conversation analysis of email conversations and interviews with participants. One set of contributions from this dissertation is methodological through the development of a codebook and the novel application of conversation analysis to online deliberation. Also, the results are significant and can contribute to our understanding of deliberation in a context for which there has been little previous research. For example, I showed that national and occupational diversity can contribute to an increase in the proportion of reasoned arguments used in a conversation as does the presence of the moderator. However, these factors along with the scope and topic of a thread vary in their degree of influence on the use of reasoned arguments by the civil society group in question. I also showed that there are specific communication strategies that participants employ such as preference organization or speaker selection that are related to different forms of reflection evident in a conversation. Finally I observed that the posting structure of a conversation specifically the distribution of emails that participants send becomes less equal as reciprocity increases. This does not augur well for a deliberative ideal that envisions both reciprocity and equal participation. Furthermore, when considering deliberation as a whole, the results indicate that its different parts are not always correlated with each other. None of the lists has more than one significant correlation between the three dimensions of deliberation. In fact, reciprocity and the use of reasoned arguments were never significantly correlated in any of the lists. Together these results point to another main finding of this dissertation which is deliberation as a whole is difficult to observe in practice. Nevertheless I suggest that separately the results for each dimension can be useful from both a design perspective and for policy-makers in general. For example, encouraging the sharing of information and a more active moderator, having the opportunity to discuss regional issues could all help to promote a greater use of reasoned arguments overall. Experimenting with different ways in which group members can get to know each other might help to reduce the disparity between participation and reciprocity. Also encouraging participants to reply inline where possible, creating easier access to the message archives and having a system for collating threads and discussions online could all promote better reflection in the lists. Finally the list might benefit from having members go through an exercise of determining whether or not and in what way decision-making should be part of their discussions. With regard to policy-makers I note that several members reported benefits for policy-makers who themselves were members of the lists. This could stem from listening and learning from the discussions of other members or actually contributing to discussions. The groups also showed the potential to collate many different policy positions around a specific problem, thus assisting policy makers in understanding issues at a regional level.

The aim of this study was to explore communication between supervisors and international students in the context of master’s supervision meetings. Nine meetings between three lecturers and seven students were audio recorded and analysed using Conversation Analysis. The focus of the study is the supervisors’ use of Yeah?, Okay? and Right? after students’ minimal responses and silence, usually following supervisors’ informing and advising turns. The use of these tags in this position is distinctive, and throws some light on the practice of supervision and on the ways students and supervisors orient to their roles. The tags can be seen to function to underline the supervisors’ actions of informing or advising, to mark transitions in the supervisors’ talk, to express doubt about the students’ understanding or agreement, and to invite students to speak. The sequences of which these tags are a part highlight both the asymmetrical relationship between supervisors and students and the negotiation of understanding and agreement that is a central issue in this setting, particularly when supervisors and students do not share the same linguistic or cultural background. I conclude by outlining some implications for supervisors’ practice, and also some specific suggestions which might be considered by teachers of English for academic purposes.

The current thesis explores conditions for participation in interview interaction. Drawing on the ethnomethodological idea that knowledge is central to participation in social situations, it examines how interview participants navigate knowledge and competence claims and the institutional and moral implications of these claims. The data consists of, in total, 97 audio-recorded interviews conducted as part of a national Swedish evaluation of support interventions for children exposed to violence. In three studies, I use discursive psychology and conversation analysis to explicate how interview participants in interaction (1) contribute to and negotiate institutional constraints and (2) manage rights and responsibilities related to knowledge. The findings of study I and study II show that child interviewees actively cooperate with as well as resist the constraints of interview questions. However, the children’s opportunities for participation in this institutional context are limited by two factors: (1) recordability; that is, the focus on generating recordable responses and (2) problematic assumptions underpinning questions and the interpretation of interview answers. Apart from restricting children’s rights to formulate their experiences, these factors can lead interviewers to miss opportunities to gain important information. Also related to institutional constraints, study III shows how the ideal of model consistency is prioritized over service-user participation. Thus, the three studies show how different practices relevant to institutional agendas may hinder participation. Moreover, the findings contribute to an understanding of how issues of knowledge are managed in the interviews. Study II suggests the importance of the concept of believability to refer to people’s rights and responsibilities to draw conclusions about others’ thoughts. And the findings of study III demonstrate how, in evaluation interviews with social workers, children’s access to their own thoughts and feelings are based on a notion of predetermined participation; that is, constructed as contingent on wanting what the institutional setting offers. Thus, child service users’ low epistemic status, compared to the social workers, trumps their epistemic access to their own minds. These conclusions, about recordability, believability, and predetermined participation, are based on interaction with or about children. However, I argue that the findings relate to interviewees and service users in general. By demonstrating the structuring power of interactive practices, the thesis extends our understanding of conditions for participation in the institutional setting of social research interviews.

No description available.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The aim of this study is to investigate politeness phenomena within the Hindu sector of the South African Indian English speaking community. The study focuses on the understanding of politeness within the target community and whether this understanding has changed over the past generation. It also examines if males and females exhibit and value politeness differently. Finally the study investigates which of the existing Western/non-Western models of politeness are relevant for describing the politeness phenomena in the target community. This study is conducted through the realizations of the speech acts of requests and apologies, focusing on the variables of age, status and social distance. In order to achieve triangulation, qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection were used. These comprised interviews with cultural/religious leaders, discourse completion tasks, interviews with families and a ranking scale. My findings reveal that the understanding of politeness phenomena within the target community is more in keeping with that in other non-Western cultures than in Western cultures. Females are found to exhibit more polite behaviours than males. Further, in general the understanding of politeness over the past generation has remained more or less constant. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2001.

The aim of the thesis is to show how gender, ethnicity and generation membership categories are constituted in talk-in-interaction. The main material comprises seven video recordings of multi-participant conversations among school pupils, aged 16 to 19. An important theoretical term is intersectionality, i.e. the interplay between different social categories. The tools of analysis are mainly derived from conversation analysis and discursive psychology. Identity is seen as a dynamic phenomenon and I analyse the identities the participants themselves make relevant during the course of the conversations. The investigation, aided by membership categorisation analysis, is carried out into how social categories are negotiated and used in establishing identity. In the analyses, social categories in particular are used in order to constitute identities by the participants’ creating contrasts between in-group, we, and out-group, them. Category-bound activities are used to constitute social categories. The participants also use more specific resources for talk-in-interaction – for example, active voicing and extreme case formulations – to establish or negotiate social categories. Interactional strategies and tools are used in resistance to avoid being attributed membership in a certain category, and partly consist of various ways of renegotiating the implication of belonging to a certain category. Thus, generalising notions about social groups become more nuanced and the adolescents avoid being categorised as passive victims of cultural notions. Gender, ethnicity and generation membership are furthermore constituted through storytelling. To sum up, the above linguistic resources are used first and foremost for three different types of discursive work during the group conversations. First, the adolescents argue that they are unique and independent and therefore not dependent on cultural expectations. Secondly, they place themselves in relation to the categories by their enacting themselves as normal in various ways. Thirdly, the adolescents establish a positive self image by modifying or renegotiating the non-desirable activities associated with the categories. The results show how the categories have situational relevance and are dealt with locally, and invoke normative expectations as to how members of social groups ought to behave.

Antalet personer insjuknade i demenssjukdom stiger, från 25 miljoner år 2000 till vad som beräknas uppgå till 63 miljoner år 2030. Demens kan beskrivas som en global störning av intellektuella funktioner där den kognitiva förmågan inklusive kommunikation är påverkad. Högtekonologiska hjälpmedel som kommunikativt stöd för personer med demens är i nuläget ett outforskat område med begränsad evidens där få studier har genomförts.Syftet med föreliggande studie var att kartlägga vilka samtalsfenomen som förekom mellan en person med demens och dennes samtalspartners med och utan surfplatta med applikationen Book Creator. Ytterligare ett syfte var att undersöka en av samtalspartnernas upplevelse av att kommunicera med personen med demens. Studien genomfördes på ett boende för personer med demenssjukdom där sammanlagt nio samtal spelades in, sex samtal utan surfplatta med applikationen Book Creator och tre samtal med surfplatta med applikationen Book Creator. Materialet omfattade 2 h och 25 min och transkriberades enligt samtalsanalytiska principer med fokus på specifika samtalsfenomen. Fem fenomen identifierades; initiativtagande, gemensam grund, koherens, ofullständig gemensam grund och icke-koherens. Frekvensen av dessa förekommande fenomen kalkylerades i procent i förhållande till det totala antalet talarturer.Resultaten visade att de samtalsfenomen som inbegrep ofullständig gemensam grund och icke-koherens med en marginell skillnad förekom i mindre frekvens i samtal med applikationen Book Creator. Personen med demens tog initiativ i lika hög utsträckning i samtal med och utan applikationen och det föreföll slutligen inte föreligga några skillnader avseende gemensam grund och koherens mellan deltagarna i samtalet med respektive utan applikationen. Det kunde även urskiljas att personen med demens kunde hantera applikationen Book Creator på egen hand med visst stöd. Samtalspartnerns upplevelser av kommunikativa svårigheter hos personer med demens, strategier för att bemöta dessa och ett behov av ökad utbildning om kommunikativt bemötande ligger i linje med tidigare forskning. / The number of people who are affected by dementia is expected to increase, from 25 million in the year 2000 to approximately 63 million in the year 2030. Dementia can be described as a global disorder of intellectual functions, where the cognitive ability including communication is affected. High technological communication aids that support people with dementia in their communication are currently an underexplored area with limited evidence. The aim of the present study was to identify interactional phenomena occurring in interaction involving one person with dementia with and without a tablet with the application Book Creator. A further aim was to examine how the conversation partner experienced the communication of the person with dementia. The study was conducted in a residential care facility for people with dementia where a total of nine conversations were recorded, six conversations without the application and three conversations with the application. The material comprised 2 hours and 25 minutes and was transcribed according to Conversation Analytic principles. Five phenomena were identified: initiative, common ground, coherence, incomplete common ground and non-coherence. The frequency of occurrence of these phenomena was calculated in percentage of their occurrence in relation to total number of turns.The result in the present study indicated that the interactional phenomena involving incomplete common ground and non-coherence occurred in a reduced frequency in conversations with the application Book Creator. The person with dementia took the initiative to the same extent in interactions with and without the application. There appeared to be no differences regarding common ground and coherence between the participants in the conversation with and without the application. The analysis also revealed that the person with dementia could handle the tablet with the application Book Creator on her own with some support. The results are in accordance with research regarding communicative difficulties in people with dementia, strategies to address these difficulties and the need of increased training in communicative treatment in dementia.