ABSTRACT

This paper concerns the interactional dilemma between displaying affiliation and doing being neutral. This dilemma is highly salient in police interviews with child witnesses where interviewing guidelines encourage police officers to take a neutral stance to avoid steering children’s stories. In this article, we use conversation analysis to analyze childrens’ volunteered accounts of their own role during the alleged offense, e.g., how they resisted. Such accounts make relevant affiliative uptakes such as approval, disagreement, or reassurance that may be seen as nonneutral. Hence, these accounts raise interactional dilemmas for police officers: Should they do what is interactionally relevant or follow the guidelines? Our analysis shows how police officers display and deal with this dilemma and that children may add to it by pursuing something more than neutralistic uptakes. The upshot of this analysis is that attempting to be neutral in interaction may cause apparently undesirable interactional difficulties. The data are from the Netherlands.

摘要

本文关注的是显示从属关系和保持中立之间的互动困境。这种困境在警察与儿童证人的面谈中非常突出，其中面谈指南鼓励警察采取中立的立场，以避免引导儿童的故事。在本文中，我们使用对话分析来分析儿童在被指控的犯罪过程中对自己角色的自愿描述，例如，他们如何反抗。此类帐户会进行相关的附属吸收，例如可能被视为非中立的批准、分歧或保证。因此，这些描述给警察带来了互动困境：他们应该做与交互相关的事情还是遵循指导方针？我们的分析显示了警察如何展示和处理这种困境，而儿童可能会通过追求中立之外的东西来加剧这种困境。这种分析的结果是，试图在互动中保持中立可能会导致明显不受欢迎的互动困难。数据来自荷兰。