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Either/or questions in child psychiatric assessments: the effect of the seriousness and order of the alternatives
journal contribution
posted on 2014-06-20, 12:29 authored by Charles AntakiCharles Antaki, Michelle O'ReillyMental health practitioners, assessing children for possible psychiatric conditions, need to probe sensitive matters. We examine practitioners' use of questions which try to clarify a given issue by offering alternative descriptions of how things are: one bland, and the other clearly undesirable in some way. The undesirable states of affairs can be described in serious terms (e.g. the child wanting to kill themselves) or, while still undesirable, in less serious ones (e.g. the child feeling temporarily upset). We find that if an undesirable state of affairs is described in seriously negative terms, it tends to be put as the first item in the pair of alternatives. We argue that this version of the familiar 'optimistic questioning' practice ensures that were the negative case to be chosen, it would be in spite of it being the more interactionally difficult answer to give. That makes the answer diagnostically more reliable. We discuss the pros and cons use of this practice in the environment of triage. © The Author(s) 2014.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Discourse StudiesVolume
16Issue
3Pages
327 - 345Citation
ANTAKI, C. and O'REILLY, M., 2014. Either/or questions in child psychiatric assessments: the effect of the seriousness and order of the alternatives. Discourse Studies, 16 (3), pp. 327 - 345Publisher
Sage Publications / © The AuthorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publication date
2014Notes
This article is closed access, it was published in the journal Discourse Studies [Sage Publications /© The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445613508898ISSN
1461-4456eISSN
1461-7080Publisher version
Language
- en
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