Joyce Lamerichs - Children and Mental Health Talk: Perspectives on Social Competence

This series brings together rich theoretical and empirical discussion at the intersection of mental health and discourse/conversation analysis. Situated broadly within a social constructionist perspective, the books included within this series will offer theoretical and empirical examples highlighting the discursive practices that surround mental health and make real mental health constructs. Drawing upon a variety of discourse and conversation analysis perspectives, as well as data sources, the books will allow scholars and practitioners alike to better understand the role of language in the making of mental health.

Editorial Board

We are very grateful to our expert editorial board who continue to provide support for the book series. We are especially appreciative of the feedback that they have provided on earlier drafts of this book. Their supportive comments and ideas to improve the book have been very helpful in our development of the text. They continue to provide support as we continue to edit the book series the language of mental health. We acknowledge them here in alphabetical order by surname.

Tim Auburn, Plymouth University, UK

Galina Bolden, Rutgers University, USA

Susan Danby, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Debra Friedman, Indiana University, USA

Ian Hutchby, University of Leicester, UK

Doug Maynard, University of Wisconsin, USA

Emily A. Nusbaum, University of San Francisco, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15193

Cover illustration: Elena Ray/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This collection has arisen out of many years of shared research interests in exploring how childrens social competence plays out in different institutional settings. We each have been involved in undertaking research in which a childs well-being and mental health constitute a focus of those investigations. Broadly within the contributions of this book, the authors present detailed analysis of naturally occurring social encounters based on interactions that involve children in a range of clinical, non-clinical and research settings . The focus of this book marks a watershed moment in that we attend to both the research component of understanding childrens interactional competence in situ and also the role of the professional through their reflections.

This book grew out of seminars, activities and professional development programs for researchers and professionals to reflect together on research and professional insights. A seminar held at Queensland University of Technology in October 2016 titled Who is the expert here? (led by Susan Danbyand Stuart Ekberg) brought together researchers and professionals to share and reflect upon the research undertaken within a range of health and educational settings. The researchers discussed how their collaborations with the practitioners enriched the research practices, and the professionals considered what this might mean for their professional practices (e.g., see Houen, 2017). This approach optimises the usefulness of bringing together researchers and professionals to share their thinking in ways that produce more explanatory power than a single approach alone can do (McWilliam, 2012).

The power of these research-practice nexus conversations challenges existing ways where research may be privileged over practice. The conversations of professional reflections are consistent with the ongoing rise of applied conversation analysis (Antaki, 2011). While Harvey Sacks early work (1992) with the suicide prevention centre may be considered an example of applied conversation analysis , more recent initiatives more formally connect research with practice and, importantly, explicate the many lessons learned when working closely together with organisations (Kitzinger, 2011). There are complexities and difficulties, and possible discrepancies can exist between the language of professionals and the language of researchers using ethnomethodological and conversation analysis approaches (Perkyl& Vehvilinen, 2003). For researchers, it is important to learn and engage with the language of professionals , to be able to communicate the findings from conversation analyses in ways that are recognisable and relevant to the organisation (Kitzinger, 2011).

Perhaps the most well-known method in the field of Conversation Analysis for using empirically based conversation analytic evidence to understand communication within organisations is the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM) (Stokoe, 2014). This approach uses audio and video recordings of actual encounters and then overlays these with a framework to discuss and understand how practitioners go about their mundane everyday work activities. This approach is a model of professional development that has produced new understandings to support practitioners and organisations to engage in effective communication practices. Building on CARM (Stokoe, 2014), others have brought together researchers and professionals with the aim to improve workplace communication. For instance, Church and Bateman have designed a method to engage in practical work with early childhood teachers (Church& Bateman, 2019). Known as the Conversation Analysis in Early Childhood (CAiEC) approach, the CAiEC workshops ( https://www.caiecworkshops.com ) are philosophically structured within an interactional competence framework where teachers professional knowledge is valued, and research and practice meet in collaborative and constructive ways to explore early childhood teaching strategies. As with CARM, CAiEC workshops use video footage of real-life practice as a discussion point with professionals around how particular practices support childrens learning, stimulating reflection and informing both future practice and research. A similar focus on interactional strategies also is central to the Discursive Action Method (Lamerichs& te Molder, 2011), which has been used to invite adolescents and social workers to reflect on particular instances of their own talk and inspect the strategies they use. The method has since then been developed further and is currently used to guide different group of professionals to approach the communicative practices in which they engage as dialogical conversations (Aarts & Te Molder, 2017; see also https://www.centrumvoordialoog.nl ).