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ANTAKI ET AL INITIATIONS FINAL.pdf (559.56 kB)

How adults with a profound intellectual disability engage others in interaction

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-01, 13:22 authored by Charles Antaki, Rebecca J. Crompton, Chris Walton, W.M.L. Finlay
Using video records of everyday life in a residential home, we report on what interactional practices are used by people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities to initiate encounters. There were very few initiations, and all presented difficulties to the interlocutor; one (which we call "blank recipiency") gave the interlocutor virtually no information at all on which to base a response. Only when the initiation was of a new phase in an interaction already under way (for example, the initiation of an alternative trajectory of a proposed physical move) was it likely to be successfully sustained. We show how interlocutors (support staff; the recording researcher) responded to initiations verbally, as if to neurotypical speakers - but inappropriately for people unable to comprehend, or to produce well-fitted next turns. This misreliance on ordinary speakers' conversational practices was one factor that contributed to residents abandoning the interaction in almost all cases. We discuss the dilemma confronting care workers.

History

Published in

Sociology of Health and Illness: a journal of medical sociology

Volume

39

Issue

4

Pages

581 - 598

Citation

ANTAKI, C. ... et al., 2016. How adults with a profound intellectual disability engage others in interaction. Sociology of Health & Illness, 39 (4), pp. 581–598.

Publisher

Wiley © Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-08-11

Publication date

2016-10-20

Notes

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: ANTAKI, C. ... et al., 2016. How adults with a profound intellectual disability engage others in interaction. Sociology of Health & Illness, 39 (4), pp. 581–598., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12500. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions

ISSN

1467-9566

Language

  • en