Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis by Richard Fitzgerald William Housley

Author:Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley [Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446270738
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2015-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

From the Inability to ‘Do MCA’ in a Q/A Setting to the Ascription of Mental Retardation

After a brief pause, the psychiatrist re-designs his question so as to explicitly introduce the question of the relevance of age as a categorisation factor, with an interro-negative question which strongly projects assent (Lines 101–102, below).

Extract 7 (Continued from Extract 6)

After obtaining a type-conforming but minimal assent, the psychiatrist opens up his questioning with a wh-question asking why age is relevant (Lines 104–5). In his reply the recipient at last introduces an age-related categorisation device: being of age/not being of age (Line 107). The questioner responds to this by asking what being of age means (Line 109), getting a correct answer (Line 111). Then the recipient produces an inaudible expansion, on which the psychiatrist prompts him to elaborate (Line 116). The recipient treats that as indicating some trouble with his prior response, and he repairs his definition of being of age to an older, no longer valid one (Line 118), a definition which the psychiatrist states as being wrong (Lines 121–2).

The psychiatrist then moves the categorisation work to a close by asking for the recipient’s age and introducing a new topic, that is trying to determine whether the inmate had a legal tutor to take care of his business. This change of topic (towards the issue of incomplete legal responsibility), coming sequentially after a categorisation sequence of which most issues were left open and noticeably unresolved (a wrong definition of being of age, no agreement on an adequate age-related MCD, and therefore no category-based reasoning leading to an account of the abnormal character of the recipient’s previous actions) highlights once more the possible incompetency of the recipient, although no inferences from his inability to commonsensically analyse the situation in question in terms of relevant membership categories are overtly made at that stage.

What was the point of such an extensive and, as we have seen, painful categorisation sequence? How is it used? This becomes visible in the final deliberation in which the members of the commission must agree on the future dangerousness of the inmate they have just heard and on the kind of monitoring he should be subjected to (electronic location surveillance, psychotherapy or chemical treatments). Since these were not deliberations leading to a decision with legal effect, I was allowed to attend and to take extensive notes. In the parts which will interest us now I tried to monitor and write down in shorthand the psychiatrist’s arguments as accurately as possible, but I missed several short turns, often done in overlap, which accounts for some of the pauses and restarts in the main line of the argument. It is therefore impossible to do a detailed sequential analysis of these sequences on the basis of a partial transcription. We may only note here that, in such an environment, as in the case of jury deliberations in trials, taking turns is tightly articulated with taking sides (Manzo, 1996), and that the kind of overlapping talk produced

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