Generally, online support groups are viewed as low-threshold services. We challenge this assumption with an investigation, based on Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, of contributions to an online support group on eating disorders. In this analysis we show how a new member interacts with existing members in order to display legitimacy for membership of the group. The group operates as a Community of Practice, since membership is organized as joined participation in a writing practice. It becomes clear that becoming a member involves subscribing to normative requirements, centrally, displaying the insight that you are ill. In the case we focus on, this involves the requirement to leave pro-anorexia as a membership category behind. The novice does not yet seem ready to subscribe to this norm and thus the threshold for seeking support is heightened.

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In this article, we present an analysis of closings in two counseling media: online, text-based exchanges (usually referred to as "chat" sessions) and telephone calls. Previous research has found that the participant who initiated a conversation preferably also initiates its termination with a possible preclosing. Advice acknowledgments, lying in the epistemic domain of the client, are devices that may work as preclosings. However, in text-based chat clients regularly refrain from advice acknowledgment. While counselors use various practices to elicit advice acknowledgment in the context of potential advice resistance, hoaxing, and/or seemingly long pauses, these questions do not always succeed as "closing devices." This offers an explanation for counselors' perception of online chatting as more difficult than calling. The data are in Dutch with English translation. In the Netherlands, information about alcohol and drugs is provided through various media, including several helplines and a national online, text-based service (usually known as a "chat" service) that is accessible through a number of Web sites. These services have the purpose of providing the general population with accurate information about alcohol and drugs. The We thank Trimbos Institute, and particularly Nathalie Dekker, for the collaboration in and commitment to the research project that resulted in, among other things, this article.

This article demonstrates how nicknames that are used by participants in a German forum on eating disorders can be read as identity displays and how they may be related to eating disorders. A qualitative analysis of 83 nicknames of the Hungrig-Online forum reveals that denotational and stereotypical features, along with well-known referents of the names, interdependently characterize participants. Persona attributes such as smallness, weightlessness, childishness, negative self-evaluation, and depression, but also (arguably) self-confidence, are shown to be apparent in the nicknames; many of these attributes can be linked to multifaceted femininity. These findings are then related to general characteristics of eating disorders. In concluding, the far-reaching rules for registration of nicknames in the forum are taken into account and questioned, for it may be that in sensitive online groups, nicknames play an especially important role in identity construction.

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This article examines recipient design in online counselling. Recipient design has been found to be an important aspect of professional-client interaction (Heritage 2002; Wilkinson 2011). It essentially means that professionals devise their talk for the specific client, which is crucial for building the counselling relationship. This article focuses on the ways in which counsellors and clients design their salutations, closings and pronoun address forms in e-mail with the recipient in mind. It is known that second person pronouns (in languages with informal vs. formal pronouns) invoke a certain social distance between the participants and that greetings play an important role in establishing social relations in e-mail. The analysis, informed by conversation analysis, revealed that while counsellors initially use a formal recipient design in the e-mails, clients frequently use informal salutations, closings and/or the informal second person pronoun (T) to reduce the social distance to the counsellor. Rarely, they also directly request to be addressed more informally. Another finding is that counsellors sometimes fail to recipient-design their e-mails, which seems related to the use of prefabricated text or ‘forgetting’ which client preferred which recipient design.

We conducted a conversation analysis of 21 threads initiated by newcomers of an online support group (OSG) on eating disorders, to examine the discursive process of entering such a group. The analysis revealed three important issues. First, many newcomers articulate that the step to join the group is extremely difficult. Second, a presentation of the self in terms of a diagnosis works as a legitimization for joining the forum. The data suggest that participants who do not fulfil the conditions for such a legitimization do not join the forum. Third, the option of acquiring a serious symptom as a solution to the legitimization problem is offered by one of the regular members. Hence, the newcomers' discourse reveals issues relevant to the accessibility for undiagnosed sufferers. We discuss these findings theoretically as a phenomenon of self-presentation in relation to community norms. The analysis generates the hypothesis that newcomers are confronted with implicit norms regarding membership legitimacy that they should obey in their self-presentation, although they may not be ready yet to actually do so. OSGs should find strategies to facilitate various possibilities for newcomers to present themselves to the group while becoming a member.

This paper discusses questions about sources of knowledge in Dutch police interviews with child witnesses. Police officers are instructed to ask these questions in order to allow participants in the criminal procedure to assess the reliability of the testimony. In everyday interaction, asking “how someone knows” implies that what was said earlier is not taken for granted. Therefore, questions about sources of knowledge in police interviews are potentially delicate. This paper aims to show that (a) questions about sources of knowledge are related to a specialized institutional inference system and (b) children sometimes treat those questions as causing a dilemma between the need to provide an answer and the unusual character of the question. Drawing on insights from conversation analysis, the analysis focuses on occasions when children present their answer about the source of their knowledge as self-evident. These responses suggest that the question is not genuine and legitimate. At the same time, children still try to provide a relevant answer. The self-evident answers thus deal with the explicit request for a source of knowledge and, from their perspective, the unnecessary character of the question. Police officers generally ignore the self-evident aspect of the answers in their uptakes. Yet, when they do orient to it, they justify their questions as genuine information seeking questions. Police officers thus treat sources of knowledge as something they did not know, whereas sources of knowledge often can be inferred in everyday language use. We suggest that taking this unknowing stance conveys to the child and to the tape that the police officers are not presuming specific sources of knowledge.