No description available.

No description available.

This study examines political accountability within the context of ministerial accountability towards the Scottish parliamentary committees. A review of the existing literature on accountability identified striking discrepancies between different disciplinary perspectives. In particular, political science research (e.g. Mayer, 1999) focuses on describing the structural mechanisms available for constraining the behaviour of those being made accountable. This literature includes research on ministerial accountability (e.g. Flinders, 1991), although largely focusing on accountability towards the parliamentary Chamber rather than the committees. By contrast, the psychological literature does not focus on accountability, but rather on developing a classification of accounts (e.g. Scott and Lyman, 1968) doing the kind of work that is examined in political science under ‘accountability’ (i.e. providing excuses and justifications to explain problematic behaviours), and testing these accounts using experimental designs (e.g. Weiner et al., 1987). However, given its focus on classification and experimental designs, the psychological literature on accounts treats language as reified and abstract. A third (discourse and conversation analytic) research tradition uses recordings of real-life verbal interactions to examine the turn-by-turn unfolding of interactions (e.g. Atkinson and Drew, 1979), but few studies focus on accountability, and none specifically investigate political accountability. My study is the first to bridge the gap between these three disciplinary perspectives by examining the practice of political accountability through the turn-by-turn unfolding of interactions between ministers and members of Scottish parliamentary committees. The thesis aims to contribute to an understanding of democracy in action by providing an insight into the practical ways in which accountability is accomplished within this specific real-life setting. The corpus of data was compiled from 27 hours of video recordings of interactions between ministers and members of four Scottish parliamentary committees. I analysed the data using conversation analysis (CA). Use of CA led me to identify indirectness as a pervading characteristic of the ways in which challenges are formulated and attended to in the interactions between committee members and ministers, as well as a number of ways in which committee members and ministers attended to matters of stake and interest in relation to such challenges. In addition, CA has allowed an insight into the limits of accountability by showing how ministers can avoid answering particular questions. These findings stand in stark contrast to the political science literature, which emphasises the adversarial nature of interactions within parliamentary settings and the availability of mechanisms for holding ministers to account (e.g. parliamentary committees) without investigating the way in which these mechanisms are used in practice. Furthermore, these findings contribute to the psychological literature on accounts by investigating their use within a real-life setting, and to the discourse and conversation analytic literature by showing the way in which well-known conversational devices (e.g. footing) are adapted to suit the specific context of parliamentary committee meetings with ministers.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 138-149) and index.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Waikato, 2008. / Title from PDF cover (viewed May 11, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-215)

Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2009. / Thesis Advisor(s): Martell, Craig H. "September 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on November 9, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77). Also available in print.

Results from curriculum enactment and sociolinguistic research have indicated that lessons are composed of information exchanges consisting of mostly facts and procedures that place little cognitive demand on students. Scholars from these areas have ascribed the characteristics of the school, teacher, student, management and task demands, or linguistic, and/or social context as explanations for those observations. They have not made a direct connection between how teachers and students decide who takes responsibility for providing the intellectual content of lessons and how that decision affects the students' higher order contributions. Consequently, the present study was designed to examine the way teachers and students cooperated for effective information exchanges and how that cooperative effort influenced students' higher order contributions. One hundred twelve chemistry and mathematics tutorials formed the data. The volunteer tutors possessed extensive training in their subject areas and the problems for discussion were designed to make high cognitive demands on the volunteer students. Methods from discourse analysis were used to develop an analytical model to identify, describe, and compare how the tutors and students exchanged information. The model was applied to the data to provide information on the following topics; the roles of the tutor and student, the substance of the exchanges, and the use of mediation strategies. Next, a code of conduct known as Grice's (1975) theory of conversational implicature was used to interpret the results of the analysis. The aim was to link conversational cooperation with students' higher order contributions to the discourse. First, the results indicated a model can be developed to describe, compare, and categorize instructional conversations. Second, tutors and students cooperate to maintain their roles during instruction and mediation strategies support those roles. Third, tutors and students intuitively follow Grice's (1975) conversational code of conduct to support their roles during their information exchanges. This cooperative effort is rooted in the conditions for conversational implicature. It was found when teachers and students explicitly negotiate and accept new intellectual roles before instruction (the conditions for implicature), higher order thinking can be encouraged by teachers and contributed by students to instructional conversations.

No description available.

This thesis explores the long-standing debate in the field of psychotherapy around the use of humour in psychotherapy and the shift from outcome to process research in psychotherapy research. In line with the social constructionist framework of this study, the researcher’s position is outlined. The literature review describes the link between language and the construction of both the therapeutic relationship and humour. The functions of humour in psychotherapy are outlined, and the contribution that Conversation Analysis (CA) can make in this evolution. CA, with its focus on the social action of talk, is employed on three audio-tapes of psychotherapy within this research to identify the resources drawn upon by interactants, and to examine the sequential environments in which humour arises and the responses to humorous utterances. Linguistic devices used to create humour included hyperbole, irony in conveying contrasting incongruent frames of reference, repetition, empathic self-disclosure, sarcasm, facetiousness, normalising statements, humorous impersonation and anthropomorphic personification. Humour emerged in the sequential environment of repeating and elaborating on diverging viewpoints outside of therapy. Humour in the context of persuasion and resistance functioned to dismantle client resistance and contrast their competing perspectives. Humour made in the context of uncertainty exaggerated pre-existing conversational disruption, allowing a move into repair. Humour was used to contrast new and old ways of viewing situations in the process of therapeutic change. Therapists used humour strategically to move into therapeutic tasks such as formulation, reinterpretation, lexical substitution, invitation to express emotion, praise for following an intervention and empathy. Results are discussed in relation to humour's potential place in pertinent areas of therapy such as the therapeutic relationship, empathy and emotional connectedness, unconditional positive regard, congruence, resistance, uncertainty and change. Clinical implications are summarised drawing on these concepts. Strengths and limitations of the project are outlined, future research suggested and reflections by the researcher conclude this thesis.