Identity and action: Help‐seeking requests in calls to a victim support service. (12th February 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Tennent, Emma
• Other Names: Sambaraju Rahul guestEditor.; McVittie Chris guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: British journal of social psychology. Volume 60:Part 4(2021)
• Page Start: 1241
• Page End: 1261
• Publication Date: 2021-02-12
• Subjects: discursive psychology -- conversation analysis -- membership categorisation analysis -- institutional talk -- helpline interaction -- accountability -- epistemics -- deontics -- affect -- emotion -- morality; Social psychology -- Periodicals; 302.05
• DOI: 10.1111/bjso.12448
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0144-6665

Abstract

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.