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Dissertation

Police interviews with suspects in police stations in England

TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on three particular aspects of police-suspect social interactions: how police questioning is oriented to some key legal concepts, e.g. actus reus, mens rea and evidence, that underpin the decision about whether the event investigated was indeed a criminal offence; how suspects narratives or accounts are co-constructed, i.e. negotiated, evaluated and transformed, in order to gain legal relevance especially in terms of the legal concepts; and the linguistic resources and the sense-making practices used by police officers to transform lay narratives
Abstract: This thesis is about police interviews with suspects in England. The suspects in these interviews have been arrested in connection with their involvement in relatively low-level offences. They comprise incidents ranging from threatening behaviour, harassment and breach of bail conditions to criminal damage, theft and assault. They are certainly not the remarkable and dramatic cases which appear in the front pages of the newspapers and fill television programmes over the week; nonetheless they are hugely important to the fabric of law-in-action in our society, as they represent the most ordinary and mundane legal work in the context of the criminal justice system in England. I draw upon a sample of 27 investigative interviews with suspects, recorded in audio as part of a standard police procedure for potential use in court. The data was transcribed and analysed within an ethnomethodological framework and using conversation analysis. My research focuses principally on three particular aspects of police-suspect social interactions: how police questioning is oriented to some key legal concepts, e.g. actus reus, mens rea and evidence, that underpin the decision about whether the event investigated was indeed a criminal offence; how suspects narratives or accounts are co-constructed, i.e. negotiated, evaluated and transformed, in order to gain legal relevance especially in terms of the legal concepts aforementioned; and the linguistic resources and the sense-making practices used by police officers to transform lay narratives or accounts into legal informed material. My analysis is divided as follows. In chapter 4, I examine how police officers may elicit prejudicial information from suspects. In chapter 5, I describe in more detail how police officers transform and summarise what they themselves or the suspects have previously said in the interview. Following this, in chapter 6 and 7, I address two very particular defensive strategies adopted by suspects when questioned about their involvement in a criminal offence: portraying the incident as an accident and blaming the putative victim. I show that these social actions and practices are fundamental for understanding how legal concepts not only inform these interactions but are also constructed through them; they orient not only the nature but also the direction of the questioning and the criteria for building a case.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The second edition of the Second Edition as mentioned in this paper is a collection of essays about philosophy and social sciences with a focus on the nature of meaningful behaviour and its relationship to the social sciences.
Abstract: Preface to the Second Edition Part 1: Philosophical Bearings 1. Aims and Strategy 2. The Underlabourer Conception of Philosophy 3. Philosophy and Science 4. The Philosopher's Concern with Language 5. Conceptual and Empirical Enquiries 6. The Pivotal Role of Epistemology in Philosophy 7. Epistemology and the Understanding of Society 8. Rules: Wittgenstein's Analysis 9. Some Misunderstandings of Wittgenstein Part 2: The Nature of Meaningful Behaviour 1. Philosophy and Sociology 2. Meaningful Behaviour 3. Activities and Precepts 4. Rules and Habits 5. Reflectiveness Part 3: The Social Studies as Science 1. J.S. Mill's 'Logic of the Moral Sciences' 2. Differences in Degree and Differences in Kind 3. Motives and Causes 4. Motives, Dispositions and Reasons 5. The Investigation of Regularities 6. Understanding Social Institutions 7. Prediction in the Social Studies Part 4: The Mind and Society 1. Pareto: Logical and Non-Logical Conduct 2. Pareto: Residues and Derivations 3. Max Weber: Verstehen and Causal Explanation 4. Max Weber: Meaningful Action and Social Action Part 5: Concepts and Actions 1. The Internality of Social Relations 2. Discursive and Non-Discursive 'Ideas' 3. The Social Sciences and History 4. Concluding Remark

1,329 citations

01 Jan 1957
TL;DR: Documentation created as part of the Perceptual Form of the City, a research project investigating the individual’s perception of the urban landscape, reviews techniques used, general critique and future proposals.
Abstract: Documentation created as part of the Perceptual Form of the City, a research project investigating the individual’s perception of the urban landscape. Includes a review of techniques used, general critique and future proposals.

421 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Aug 2015

2 citations

Book Chapter
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: The other authors are professors of psychology at Loughborough University as mentioned in this paper, who have published a survey of the state of the art in the field of psychophysics and psychology.
Abstract: The other authors are professors of psychology at Loughborough University. Copyright is with Oxford University Press.

1 citations

Dissertation
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: The analysis uses primarily conversation analysis (CA) method to uncover the moment-by-moment interactional and sequential patterns during primary care encounters; in doing so, contributing to the understanding of the social organization of Chinese primary care medicine.
Abstract: This research is one of the first studies of Chinese primary care doctor-patient communication. The study collected a large data corpus of video-recorded acute-visit consultations from two outpatient clinics of an ordinary Chinese hospital. The analysis uses primarily conversation analysis (CA) method to uncover the moment-by-moment interactional and sequential patterns during primary care encounters; in doing so, contributing to our understanding of the social organization of Chinese primary care medicine.

1 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1980
TL;DR: Bourdieu as mentioned in this paper develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood.
Abstract: Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.

21,227 citations

Book
01 Jan 1967
TL;DR: This work focuses on Ethnomethodology, which investigates the role of sex status in the lives of the Intersexed Person and some of the rules of Correct Decisions that Jurors Respect.
Abstract: 1. What is Ethnomethodology?. 2. Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities. 3. Common Sense Knowledge of Social Structures: The Documentary Method of Interpretation in Lay and Professional Fact Finding. 4. Some Rules of Correct Decisions that Jurors Respect. 5. Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in the Intersexed Person. 6. "Good Organizational Reasons for a Bada Clinic Records". 7. Methodological Adequacy in the Quantitative Study of Selection Criteria and Selection Practices in Psychiatric Outpatient Clinics. 8. The Rational Properties of Scientific and Common Sense Activities. Appendix.

11,533 citations


"Police interviews with suspects in ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Police questioning in England seems to involve devices or ethnomethods (Garfinkel, 1967) that are much subtler and more refined than the tactics often associated with interrogations and which are legally prohibited....

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  • ...Sociologists have been aware of the importance of accounts since the late 1960’s, when more attention began to be given to talk, considering it as a fundamental and constitutive material of social life (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1992)....

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  • ...Indeed, it was doing his seminal work on jury deliberations that Harold Garfinkel coined the term ‘ethnomethodology’ in order to characterize the study of the methods jurors use to decide legal cases (Garfinkel, 1967)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 1974-Language
TL;DR: Turn-taking is used for the ordering of moves in games, for allocating political office, for regulating traffic at intersections, for the servicing of customers at business establishments, and for talking in interviews, meetings, debates, ceremonies, conversations.
Abstract: Publisher Summary Turn taking is used for the ordering of moves in games, for allocating political office, for regulating traffic at intersections, for the servicing of customers at business establishments, and for talking in interviews, meetings, debates, ceremonies, conversations. This chapter discusses the turn-taking system for conversation. On the basis of research using audio recordings of naturally occurring conversations, the chapter highlights the organization of turn taking for conversation and extracts some of the interest that organization has. The turn-taking system for conversation can be described in terms of two components and a set of rules. These two components are turn-constructional component and turn-constructional component. Turn-allocational techniques are distributed into two groups: (1) those in which next turn is allocated by current speaker selecting a next speaker and (2) those in which next turn is allocated by self-selection. The turn-taking rule-set provides for the localization of gap and overlap possibilities at transition-relevance places and their immediate environment, cleansing the rest of a turn's space of systematic bases for their possibility.

10,944 citations


"Police interviews with suspects in ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...In fact, Sacks seemed much more interested in studying the general issues of ordinary social interaction (ten Have, 2007), which resulted in a series of studies which were focused on the ‘systematics of ordinary conversation’ (Sacks et al., 1974)....

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Book
01 Jan 1995
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a collection of seasons from Fall 1964 - Spring 1965 - Spring 1966 Fall 1965 Fall 1965 Spring 1966 Winter 1967 Spring 1967 Spring 1968 Fall 1967 Fall 1968 Spring 1968 Spring 1969 Winter 1969 Winter 1970 Spring 1970 Winter 1971 Spring 1971 Spring 1970 Fall 1971 Fall 1971 Spring 1972 Spring 1972
Abstract: Volume 1: Fall 1964 - Spring 1965 Fall 1965 Spring 1966 Winter 1967 Spring 1967 Fall 1967 Spring 1968. Volume 2: Fall 1968 Winter 1969 Winter 1970 Spring 1970 Winter 1971 Spring 1971 Fall 1971 Spring 1972.

3,665 citations


"Police interviews with suspects in ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...As Sacks (1992) had previously noticed, one is given partial control of the conversation by being in the position of asking the questions....

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  • ...Put another way, by using particular descriptive devices and resources, suspects manage to exhibit rather than claim that their actions were not intentional (Drew, 1992; Sacks, 1992)....

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  • ...In these interviews, police officers are monitoring the coherence and consistency of suspects’ accounts based on commonsense knowledge of social structures (Komter, 2003; Sacks, 1992), and these sense-making procedures are essential for them to bring the incongruencies of these accounts on to the surface of talk and build evidence for a potential prosecution....

    [...]

  • ...Sociologists have been aware of the importance of accounts since the late 1960’s, when more attention began to be given to talk, considering it as a fundamental and constitutive material of social life (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1992)....

    [...]