Tennent Emma
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Br J Soc Psychol. 2021 Oct;60(4):1241-1261. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12448. Epub 2021 Feb 12.
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.
身份认同与行为之间联系的本质是社会科学的一个基本问题。心理学的一个关注点是诸如寻求帮助之类的行为如何与身份认同问题相关联。本文呈现了一项关于社会互动中身份认同与帮助的话语心理学研究。基于近400个拨打给受害者支持热线的录音语料库，我分析了参与者如何看待身份认同与帮助之间的联系。关注参与者之间的认知、道义和情感关系，我分析了身份认同如何在构建和解释求助请求方面明显相关且具有程序上的重要性。参与者表现出一种理解，即向受害者支持机构寻求帮助必然涉及身份认同。来电者作为受害者或客户的身份使他们的求助行为具有可解释性，并为接听者赋予了作为支持服务代表的身份。研究结果表明，身份认同与帮助是相互构成的。寻求帮助构成了来电者作为受害者的身份认同；而他们作为受害者的身份认同构成了他们的求助请求。我认为，分析社会互动中的身份认同与帮助为身份认同与行为之间的相互构成联系提供了证据。
