No abstract

The article collects the variation of forms of subtle persuasion embedded in social work interviewing. It is based on the constructionist idea that institutional interviewing is not an innocent practice of information gathering, but a practice that also produces knowledge and creates identities.

Participants in a conversation may, even within the same basic role staging, create different cooperation settings. To describe these cooperative settings, we employ the concept of interactional position as a basic analytical tool. From our understanding of identity as a conversational achievement, we demonstrate how evolving interactional positions frame the construction of client identities in family therapy meetings. We focus particularly on how constructions of fatherhood identity are negotiated in the meetings. The methodological perspective of our study draws on social psychological discourse analysis, conversation analysis and social constructionism, and the data consists of video recordings of six family therapy meetings dealing with a single case. The analysis demonstrates the large variety of combinations of interactional positions that are possible in family therapy conversation and explicates how strongly the construction of the client’s identity depends on the position combinations allowed in a therapy session.

Although the benefits of contact for positive intergroup relations are widely acknowledged, less is known about how group members construct the agency and responsibility of contact participants in intergroup encounters. Using critical discursive psychology, we analysed the interpretative repertoires that Finnish majority mothers (N = 13) and mothers with an immigrant background (N = 10) used when talking about a hypothetical intergroup encounter among Finnish and immigrant mothers in a ‘family café’ (a group for mothers and children). Our analysis identified five interpretative repertoires that differed in terms of the levels of categorization used (individual, group, motherhood) and how agency and responsibility for initiating contact were discursively attributed to the parties in the intergroup encounter. Overall, constructing someone as agentic did not automatically result in their being portrayed as more responsible for making contact. Respondents described contact to occur with only two repertoires, in which both agency and responsibility for initiating contact were discursively attributed to the same party. This highlights the need to consider both agency and sense of responsibility as possible factors preceding intergroup contact.

Suffering from a contested illness poses a serious threat to one's identity. We analyzed the rhetorical identity management strategies respondents used when depicting their health problems and lives in the context of observed or suspected indoor air (IA) problems in the workplace. The data consisted of essays collected by the Finnish Literature Society. We used discourse-oriented methods to interpret a variety of language uses in the construction of identity strategies. Six strategies were identified: respondents described themselves as normal and good citizens with strong characters, and as IA sufferers who received acknowledge from others, offered positive meanings to their in-group, and demanded recognition. These identity strategies located on two continua: (a) individual- and collective-level strategies and (b) dissolved and emphasized (sub)category boundaries. The practical conclusion is that professionals should be aware of these complex coping strategies when aiming to interact effectively with people suffering from contested illnesses.