To investigate the relationship between face and equivocation in political interviews, a new typology of questions was devised, based on their face‐threatening properties. This typology was applied to the analysis of 18 interviews with the leaders of the three main political parties in the 1992 British General Election. Nineteen different subcategories were distinguished, grouped into three superordinate categories of face which politicians must defend—their own personal face, the face of the party which they represent and face in relation to supporting or not supporting significant others. On the basis of this analysis, a new model of question‐response sequences in political interviews was proposed, the main tenet of which is that face is the most important factor in determining whether or not a politician replies to a question. This model provides both a means of predicting the direction of politicians' responses to questions, and a framework for future studies evaluating the performance of both politicians and political interviewers.

This paper addresses a foundational issue at the interface of psychiatry and medical sociology; namely, how the judgement of pathology is made. In particular, it examines a debate over how the symptom of delusion is identified. The psychiatric approach is realist in orientation with delusions being commonly defined in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as`incorrect inferences about external reality'. However, from a social constructionist perspective, delusions are reconceptualised as the product of a power relationship in which the views of a less powerful patient are pathologised. Reviewing this argument reveals a number of ways in which constructionist sociology is critical of the psychiatric approach. However, the`debate' has a paradoxical quality in that, although the constructionist critique addresses psychiatry's foundations, it has been largely ignored. An ethnomethodological analysis of delusion is offered which attempts to account for, and move beyond, this paradox. This involves developing criticisms which are responsive to the sorts of phenomena that clinicians deal with. In other words, the argument points towards the development of a sub-discipline that deals with clinical phenomena and hence might be called clinical sociology'.