Problematic eating and its public accountability: the discursive construction of agency in radio talk

This thesis is a discursive psychological and conversation analytic examination of discourse and interaction about food, weight and eating behaviours. The data corpus consists of approximately twenty-eight hours of talk recorded from UK radio broadcasts between 2002 and 2007, the majority of which were found through online archives. Within this corpus are a variety of different radio shows where the topic under discussion is body weight or eating behaviours. Data was transcribed using the Jeffersonian method which was developed for conversation analysis (CA). After transcription was complete, CA was used to examine the design and function of the interaction, in particular its sequential organisation within the institutional setting of a radio show. [Continues.]