Measuring disability: The agency of an attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnostic questionnaire

Abstract

Scholars in language and social interaction have long been concerned with the role of texts in institutional settings, studying, for example, how interview schedules actively shape conversational dynamics between participants. While texts have been acknowledged as active in this way, their generative capacity remains largely overlooked. This article argues that like human subjects, texts in interaction enact agency. One text in particular, a screening form used to diagnose the learning disability attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is analyzed to claim that this text brings about the very condition it is designed to measure: a learning disability. Drawing from work in discursive psychology, I show how the measurement requires the client to adopt certain speaking positions, which then enables the text to speak for the client. I also demonstrate how the text constructs otherwise normal behavior as pathological through punctuation and nominalization. Finally, I illustrate how the spatial organization of the text constrains clients’ choices for interacting with it. This article claims that texts produce, rather than reflect, cognitive phenomena, and it moreover encourages that the notion of text as agent be taken seriously, especially when it presents the capacity to disable.

Talking With Each Other : The Role of Language Environment Factors on Early Language Development From Different Perspectives

“…Another reason is how the specific language assessments are constructed and interpreted. For instance, Forbes (2015) used discursive psychology to investigate in detail how an ADHD questionnaire was structured, while Muskett et al (2013) criticized the cognitivist assumptions within the semantic verbal fluency paradigm (i.e., to generate as many words as possible within a specified time). This means that it is worth keeping in mind that although the use of language assessment tools is widespread within developmental psychology and clinical practice, these assessments are full of hidden assumptions that need to be brought to the surface and reflected upon so the assessments can be used wisely.…”

The role of standardized patient assessment forms in medical communication skills education

“…Analyzing how texts intertextually draw on an authoritative discourse, as well as the pronominal, structural, and punctuational details illustrates how they perform in institutional practice. Forbes 43 notes how an ADHD screening device is strategically void of first-person pronouns (e.g., A prisoner of the moment), which affords the reader a broad interpretive range (Do I say I'm a prisoner of the moment? Do others say I'm a prisoner of the moment?…”