Tennent2021
| Tennent2021 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Tennent2021 |
| Author(s) | Emma Tennent |
| Title | Identity and action: Help-seeking requests in calls to a victim support service |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Accountability, Affect, Deontics, Discursive Psychology, Emotion, Epistemics, Helpline interaction, Institutional talk, Membership categorisation analysis, Morality, In Press |
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| Year | 2021 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | British Journal of Social Psychology |
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| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1111/bjso.12448 |
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Abstract
The nature of the link between identity and action is a fundamental question for social science. One focus in psychology is how actions like seeking help are implicated in matters of identity. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of identity and help in social interaction. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 400 recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how participants oriented to the link between identity and help. With attention to epistemic, deontic, and affective relations between participants, I analysed how identity was demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential for building and interpreting help-seeking requests. Participants displayed an understanding that seeking help from Victim Support necessarily implicates identity. Callers' identities as victims or clients rendered their help-seeking accountable and invoked identities for call-takers as representatives of a support service. The findings show that identity and help are mutually constitutive. Seeking help constituted callers' identities as victims; and their identities as victims constituted their requests for help. I suggest that analysing identity and help in social interaction provides evidence for the mutually constitutive link between identity and action.
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