posted on 2009-11-03, 13:58authored byCharles 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.