Participation Management in Family Harm Emergency Police Calls Involving Co-present Others
This research project investigated participation management in family harm emergency police calls involving co-present others. Although emergency calls are typically seen as dyadic interactions between callers and call-takers, research from helplines, medical emergency calls, and police calls indicate that co-present others can influence the organisation and progressivity of these interactions. In the context of family harm, emergency police calls present a unique adversarial dynamic, as co-present others are frequently the perpetrators of the harm being reported. Despite these findings, there is a lack of research examining how these multi-party calls are managed, raising questions about who is treated as having the right to participate and how these adversarial dynamics are discursively navigated. By utilising discursive psychology’s analytic framework of conversation analysis and the analytic tool of participation frameworks, this research examines how participation is managed between co-present others, callers, and call-takers in family harm emergency police calls in New Zealand. The analysis of eight extracts revealed that co-present others formulated their participation as challenges: contesting callers’ versions of reality and their actions. Callers and call-takers used both explicit and implicit exclusionary practices to manage co-present others’ participation. The practice of ‘institutional overhearing’ also emerged from the data as another method, used by both call-takers and callers, to manage participation. These practices reflected a shared orientation to emergency calls as having a normative dyadic structure. The findings of this research have significant implications for discursive psychology, conversation analysis, and forensic psychology. By examining how participation is managed in family harm emergency police calls, this research provides a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of multi-party dynamics in a high-stakes institutional setting. This research also offers a novel conceptualisation of co-present others, highlighting their interactional influence, and emphasises the need for a more comprehensive transcription practice that accurately represents them and their contributions. These findings also contribute to forensic psychology’s understanding of family harm by providing insights into real-time family harm situations and the real consequences callers face when reporting family harm. Finally, this research offers suggestions for improving emergency call-taker training for managing participation in multi-party family harm calls.