Violence is a social problem that therapists are called upon to address. This study focuses on how therapist Dr. Allan Wade and three female interviewees (who had been victims of violence) oriented to conversational devices, in particular those pertaining to membership categorization, during three response-based interviews. Response-based practice (RBP) is a therapeutic approach that operates on the premise that violence and oppression are unilateral acts that are always met with resistance. By incorporating a complex understanding of language and discourse, critical, postcolonial and feminist theory, and modern and postmodern therapeutic approaches, RBP offers an alternative to traditional psychological approaches. By using a variation of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, and drawing upon the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, I discuss how the participants oriented to particular conversational devices when accomplishing social tasks such as attributing perpetrator responsibility, acknowledging resistance, attending to negative social responses, and facilitating expressions of dignity. / Graduate

This is a comparative linguistic essay aimed to investigate how closing sections construct social interaction in a number of talk shows, primarily The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The talk show data is analyzed by means of Conversation Analysis (CA) which considers how language performs social interaction and the structures and norms which give the frames for this. The results of the analysis are compared to the results of a study carried out in 2003 by Esperanza Rama Martinez on the same subject matter. Martinez´ study is in fact the foundation for this study. In her study Martinez concludes that the closing phase is initiated by the interviewer and that there are always pre-closing components before the closing components begin. The results of this study are in line with Martinez´ study.

This research compared Brown and Levinson’s “face saving” account of linguistic politeness with the everyday or social normative account in the context of children’s requesting skills. The research also explored the relationship between children’s politeness skills and their behavioural adjustment. The subjects comprised four groups of ten-and-a-half year old children: a comparison group without behaviour problems, a hostile-aggressive group; an anxious-fearful group; and a comorbid group. All the children were selected from the Australian Temperament Project subject population based on parents’ ratings of the children on the hostile-aggressive and anxious-fearful subscales of the Rutter Child Behaviour Questionnaire. Study 1 found that all the groups of children discriminated between others on the power and distance dimensions in ways consistent with social norms, e.g. adults are judged as more powerful than children. Study 1 also showed that the hostile-aggressive and comorbid groups were significantly less likely to discriminate between others on these dimensions compared to the comparison group. Study 2 showed that for all the children studied politeness as a normative way of speaking was marked by use of please whereas face saving politeness was marked by the use of question directives and hints compared to other request forms. Further, Study 2 showed that there were no differences between children with and without behaviour problems in their use of please to mark different ways of asking.

Politeness Phenomena and Mild Conflict in Japanese Casual Conversation

This dissertation examines how bipolar disorder, a common and disabling psychiatric condition, is made relevant as a participants’ concern in a site of massively consequential psychological business – the psychotherapy session. As its central thesis is the claim that the practices by which bipolar disorder gets done as bipolar disorder are invariably absent in most formal accounts of the disorder. In this regard, the dissertation provides an empirically grounded description of a range of discursive practices associated with the doing of bipolar disorder in psychotherapy. This is undertaken from a discursive psychological orientation that draws extensively from ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and Wittgensteinian philosophy. Following a review of bipolar disorder as a diagnostic psychiatric category, consideration is given to alternate conceptualisations which suggest the category is constructed in-and-through complex socio-historical practices which are often occluded and considered irrelevant to the category’s situated deployment. This notion is used to provide a more sustained examination of how one might ‘get at’ such practices in situ by way of conducting ethnomethodological and conversation analytically informed investigations. In consideration of how one might approach psychological categorisation practices in talk-in-interaction, a discursive psychological orientation is developed which stresses the social, public nature of psychological categories in use. The empirical materials examined in the dissertation are drawn from a corpus of audio recordings of seven ‘naturally occurring’ psychotherapy sessions involving a clinical psychologist and five clients for whom the category ‘bipolar disorder’ has demonstrable relevance. Practices examined include those relating to the production and recognition of what might count as a bipolar disorder ‘symptom’, the manner in which ‘moods’ operate as account production devices, and the methods by which psychological terms (such as ‘thought’ and ‘feel’) operate in-and-as situated practices involved in psychotherapeutic business.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2049. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-180).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Psychology, 1998. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-200).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Also available in print.

Thesis (EdD)--Open University. BLDSC no. DXN066215.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 286-293).