Opinión de los empleadores sobre la formación profesional de los

There appear to be only very few studies on self-disclosure which adopt an interactional approach. As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, by casting a critical eye on traditional social psychology’s rudimentary treatment of self- disclosure in both institutional and non-institutional settings, DP/CA researchers analyse sequential environments where speakers bring up their personal

information. Namely, they employ an emic analytic lens to examine how self- disclosure as a social action is organised in situ, thereby elucidating several interactional features and functions of the phenomenon.

Leudar et al. (2006) seems to be one of the first CA study concerning self- disclosure, observing how psychotherapists disclose their personal details by examining twelve hours of one-to-one therapeutic sessions. They discovered that

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psychotherapists’ self-disclosure is designed to match (a relatively more theory- laden term would be echoing or reciprocating) with clients’ preceding turns. That is, therapists put forwards a commentary, including their personal experiences, matching with what a client has just uttered (ibid: 29). In this sense, the therapist’s self-disclosure turns are not stand-alone. Rather, they are contingent and relevant to the patient’s prior elaboration upon their problems. Specifically, Leudar et al. describe three position-sensitive actions of therapists’ self-disclosure: 1) the same assessment; 2) a second story using analogies; 3) a candidate answer (ibid: 30). By designing three actions as a next turn, therapists normalise the client’s experiences, in particular their troubles (the cases of the same assessment and second story) or resolve hearable absence through offering candidate statements that the client could have or ought to have articulated (the case of the candidate answer). In the conclusion section, they invite comments and feedback from practitioners in therapeautic communities, possibly to discern how the

aforementioned findings could contribute to achieving better therapeutic practices in reality. The following analysis chapters will present some interactional design and consequences similar to Leudar et al.’s (2006) fidings and this will be one of the discussion points in Chapter 8 (see section 8.2.3).

The same authors more explicitly cast doubt on traditional psychology’s

operationalisation in examining interactional phenomena such as self-disclosure in their 2005 article (Antaki et al., 2005). In particular, they described such treatment as a significant fault in the experimental psychological research culture, which treats self-disclosure merely as a variable, checklist and pre-given category operated by questionnaires and experiments. Building on this critical mindset, they proposed two imperative aspects of self-disclosure, which makes a speaker’s talk hearable as a disclosure: 1) locality: if a piece of personal information is interpreted as a self-disclosure, it is only in situ; 2) indexicality: revealing that personal information is dependent for its effect on the specific sequential environment. Therefore, self-disclosure is deemed as the interactional moment when ‘a speaker is saying more than they need to, namely, no-one in the interaction is squeezing the information out of the person’ (ibid: 187). In this sense, the speaker of self-disclosure ‘makes it sound like a bonus’, as it is not

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necessarily required by the prior speaker (ibid: 191). The current study’s

collection and analysis of the phenomenon is also grounded on this definition of self-disclosure.

With the micro-analytic investigation of segments, including self-disclosure turns in therapeutic sessions and mundane telephone calls, Antaki et al. (2005)

delineated how speakers design their talk to be self-disclosure as follows: 1) Designing information as a report of personal information; 2) Designing

information to sound significant in the circumstances; 3) Designing information as volunteered (ibid: 188-193). These design features showed how speakers bolster the newsworthiness and significance of the revealed information, along with how the utterance of self-disclosure is placed in a sequential position where it is

hearable as a reciprocation of the prior speaker’s personal information (ibid: 195). The analysis supported their critique of traditional social psychology as it

proposes ‘self-disclosure is not a simply-categorisable single piece of verbal behaviour’ (ibid: 196). Indeed, they demonstrated that self-disclosure is a situated and performed social action which is brought off in the circumstances of a given interaction.

Abell et al. (2006) is the only study investigating the interviewer’s self-disclosure in research interviews, and is therefore worth discussing in line with the current study. Interestingly, this study presented not only the cases when the interviewer’s self-disclosure successfully works up as a prompt for further talk from the

interviewee, but also several occasions when the interviewer’s self-disclosure violates an important institutional norm positing the interviewee as a provider of new information. The latter case possibly could supress the interviewee’s further talk.

By analysing combined data corpus involving 80 semi-structured interviews with young British people aged between 14 and 25, the researchers observed three types of strategic self-disclosure and its interactional consequences: 1) establishing shared experience; 2) doing similarity, receiving difference; 3) negotiating category entitlement (ibid: 225-240). Establishing shared experiences includes the cases when the interviewer references a previous

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interview/interviewee by invoking the common in-group membership with the current interviewee. Namely, the self-disclosure lies ‘within the boundary of an interview interaction’ (ibid: 227) and this strategy successfully provokes further responses from the interviewee. Doing similarity, receiving difference is the example when the interviewer’s self-disclosure marks the similarity between the speakers; however this attempt ironically ended up highlighting the difference (e.g. age and cultural identity). Negotiating category entitlement is another noteworthy phenomenon in their analysis, as this illustrated several cases when the self-disclosure appears to be treated as a display of the interviewer’s greater category entitlement (than the interviewee) relating to a topic under discussion. In this respect, the interviewer’s greater entitlement may even disrupt the normative question-answer format because the interviewee’s interactional role as an

answerer has become potentially ambiguous. In concluding the discussion, they stressed the importance of analysing the interviewer’s identity in interview interaction given that both the interviewer and interviewee negotiate appropriate identities as well as how to present their knowledge, similarity and difference (ibid: 241). The interviewer’s explicit display of similarity between the speakers is also highly relevant to this study’s analysis, and therefore this aspect will be discussed in the following analysis chapters. The violation of the institutional norm as well as the interviewer’s greater category entitlement will be important discussion point of this study, which will be deal with both in analysis chapters and discussion chapter.

Kitzenger’s (2000, 2002) CA studies on gender, sexuality and feminism are slightly different from the aforementioned literature in this sub-section, as they did not explicitly set self-disclosure as a central focus; however, her CA analysis of coming out talk provides a deeper insight in relation to how a discloser of a his/her homosexuality methodically designs her/his turns in a certain way to avoid relevant next actions. By employing the classic notion of ‘turn-taking

organisation’ (Sacks et al., 1974), she showed how a discloser produces lengthy, multi-unit turns configured with several linguistic features (e.g. if/then structure and in-breath and so forth: they seem to be designed to stretch the discloser’s TCU (Turn Construction Unit) by preventing the recipient from providing a

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response), thereby diminishing ‘the likelihood of anyone offering an assessment of, or any other response’ to the self-disclosure turns (Kitzenger, 2000: 186). That is, disclosers convey their personal information embedding their sexuality in a ‘not news format’ to avoid further topicalisation and negative evaluation from the recipient (ibid: 187). This study added several more convincing interactional features of self-disclosure, including relatively more sensitive topics such as sexuality. It is particularly interesting as the examples show how disclosers format their turns as non-commentable materials.

Svennevig (1999) is also not a specifically self-disclosure study and even the author himself claimed that ‘the focus of my analysis has not been so much self- disclosure per se’ (ibid: 141). Nevertheless, its detailed explanation of how unknown parties get acquainted with one another by performing self-presentation is worth illustrating in this section, as another important interactional study of self-disclosure (i.e. see Stokoe 2009 below) is inspired by some of the findings from this research. For example, Svennevig found various instances of self- representational sequences in the collection of getting acquainted interactions, along with the orderliness within such cases in terms of the sequential

development, as follows: 1) presentation-eliciting question 2) self-representation; 3a) acknowledgement token, 3b) continuation elicitor: topicaliser and focused, topical question, 3c) self-oriented comment (ibid: 88-89). Amongst this overall sequential structure of the social action getting acquainted, self-presentation and self-oriented comment are the most closely related to self-disclosive talk. That is, co-participants display their mutual orientation to the lack of common ground, and thus they attempt to establish and accumulate it in situ in the process of self- presentation: sharing personal information such as names, geographical origin and present occupation. Furthermore, subsequent self-oriented comment is designed to construct community co-membership and other types of similarity between the parties. Hence, his findings confirmed that sharing personal information serves to highlight familiarity between interactants, even promoting solidarity in getting acquainted interactions. This wil also show several examples in which the interviewer and interviewees, who are strangers, attempt to reveal their personal information to establish familiarity turn by turn.

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One of the important interactional studies on self-disclosure is Stokoe (2009), who investigated a corpus of police interviews to shed light on how police officers disclose personal information over the course of interrogation. Stokoe drew upon the key conceptualisation of self-disclosure from Antaki et al.’s (2005) work to challenge the analyst-oriented and coding-based concept of self-disclosive talk. She further developed the previous study by claiming that ‘self-disclosure is not a conversation analytic phenomenon, such as social actions like questioning,

assessing and affiliating’ (ibid: 156). Indeed, the instances that she analysed and presented in her article are rather closer to the CA term ‘self-reference’ with a declarative form (Schegloff, 1996, cited in Stokoe, 2009: 156). Additionally, she added a point of existing dilemma that institutional and professional speakers tend not to reveal personal details, although self-disclosure is normative in ordinary conversation.

Amongst instances of self-disclosure turns uttered by police officers, she identified that six cases were unambiguous and they were either affiliative or disaffiliative self-disclosures. Affiliative disclosure is particularly relevant to this thesis as the examples show ‘how self-disclosure serves affiliation where only alignment is expectable’ (ibid: 167). In other words, police officers ‘shift their actions from aligning to affiliating with a suspect’s prior narrative telling’ (ibid: 165). In doing this affiliative and self-disclosive work, the officers invoked categories such as gender or shared background (e.g. I’ve got a girlfriend, I grew up on a council estate), thereby ‘displaying their intersubjective understanding of the generalisable and culturally familiar elements’ embedded in the suspect’s talk (ibid: 165). Apparently, all of these interactional phenomena involving affiliation, self-disclosure and categorical work do not fit into the interactional roles of police officer and interrogator. This resonates with the current study, as it also shows the sequences in which the interviewer takes speakership rather than recipientship. Stokoe (2010) is another CA-informed study exploring self-disclosure. In particular, this paper analysed naturally occurring speed-dating encounters by providing various interesting cases of how unacquainted interactants disclose their personal information. Stokoe started the project by questioning the previous studies with regard to speed-dating processes as they did not thoroughly examine

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how the participants actually orient to one another and how they develop their conversation over the course of interaction. Contrary to the prior research, which is heavily based upon experiments and surveys, Stokoe collected recordings of real British speed-dating events and analysed the dataset using CA. She put forward three discussion points regarding the talk between speed-daters as follows: 1) eliciting and occasioning relationship history talk; 2) asking relationship history questions; 3) accountable relationship histories (ibid: 264- 272). Amongst them, how participants in speed-dating ‘elicit and occasion their relationship history talk’ is most relevant to self-disclosure (ibid: 264). That is, Stokoe observed two different types of disclosure in speed-dating interactions: volunteered and prompted. Volunteered disclosure of relationship histories is formatted as a response to a prior question asking something other than previous relationships, or ‘embedded in a narrative that was not responsive to any specific questions’ (ibid: 264). Conversely, prompted disclosure is a direct or indirect answer to prior questions relating to relationship histories. Interestingly, several excerpts in her analysis show volunteered disclosure is reciprocated with an interlocutor’s subsequent disclosure. Moreover, she found that speed-daters did not engage in actions like flirting during the conversation. Rather, they treat speed-dating as a sort of interviewing practice for potential romantic partner(s) by assessing the other party’s attributes, including their past romantic histories (ibid: 267).

As such, interactional studies on self-disclosure in this section present naturally occurring or naturalistic spoken interactions, including self-disclosure turns in various contexts, whilst discussing how the interactants design such self-revealing talk with a range of interactional resources. Albeit with the different analytic foci, all the aforementioned studies in this section have treated self-disclosure as a socially accomplished performance, which is a primary point of focus for this research.