Loughborough University
Browse
Choices paper revision3.pdf (116.65 kB)

Offering choices to people with intellectual disabilities: an interactional study

Download (116.65 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2009-11-03, 13:58 authored by Charles Antaki, W.M.L. Finlay, Chris Walton, L. Pate
At the level of policy recommendation, it is agreed that people with intellectual impairments ought to be given opportunities to make choices in their lives; indeed, in the UK, the Mental Capacity Act of 2005 enshrines such a right in law. However, at the level of practice, there is a dearth of evidence as to how choices are actually offered in everyday situations, which must hinder recommendations to change. This qualitative interactional study, based on video recordings in British residential homes, combines ethnography with the fine-grained methods of Conversation Analysis to identify some conversational practices that staff use to offer choices to residents with intellectual disabilities. We describe the unwanted consequences of some of these practices, and how the institutional imperative to solicit clear and decisive choice may sometimes succeed only in producing the opposite.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Citation

ANTAKI, C. ... et al, 2008. Offering choices to people with intellectual disabilities: an interactional study. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 52 (12), pp.1165-1175.

Publisher

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2008

Notes

This article was published in the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research [© Blackwell Publishing Ltd]. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com or at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2788.2008.01101.x

ISSN

0964-2633

Language

  • en