“And how old are you?”: Age reference as an interpretative device in radio counselling

Highlights

• Positions in life course served as an interpretative resource for establishing joint understanding of callers' troubles.

• References to callers' age were used to position the callers in the life course, and to invoke age-related expectations.

• Age references were incorporated into a contrast structure that served to depict deviations from age-related expectations.

• Descriptions of callers' life situations were reformulated into ones that included age-based normative reasoning.

Abstract

Aim of study

Negotiations about problem definitions are a crucial part of psychotherapeutic and counselling work. In a conversation with a psychotherapist or a counsellor, the client's initial description of his or her trouble is transformed into an expert-informed problem formulation. This study aims to explicate how reasoning about troubles and life difficulties in a dialogue with a psychotherapist may be grounded in cultural knowledge about ageing.

Method and data

We draw upon ethnomethodology, and particularly on conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, to describe how age identities can be invoked in reasoning about explanations and solutions of psychological problems. The data consist of telephone conversations between a psychotherapist and people seeking help for their life difficulties on a Swedish radio programme.

Results

Our analysis shows how references to callers' age were used to position the callers as members of stage-of-life categories, in order to invoke expectations tied to the categories. The callers' positions in the life course served as an interpretative resource for negotiating understanding of the callers' troubles, and suggesting a normative description of their life situations.

Conclusion

This study explicates in interactional detail the interpretative use of cultural common-sense knowledge about the life course in the context of the specific institutional tasks of radio counselling.

Introduction

Media counselling, particularly in the form of ‘media psychology’, originated in the USA in the 1950s (Bouhoutsos, Goodchilds, & Huddy, 1986). Since then psychological counselling in media has grown into a broad professional field (Henricks and Stiles, 1989, McGarrah et al., 2009). In Australia, England, Finland, France, Israel, Germany, Puerto Rico, and Taiwan, among other countries, a range of professionals such as psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and social workers have been providing their professional advice about how to cope with life's challenges on the radio as well as in newspapers and on television (e.g. Hodges, 2002, McGarrah et al., 2009, Raviv et al., 1989). This paper draws upon data from a Swedish radio programme, The Radio Psychologist, episodes of which consist of conversations between a psychotherapist and people seeking help with various psychological problems, such as coping with anxiety, overcoming traumatic childhood experiences, living with grief, or resolving difficulties in their family relationships. The aim of the study is to explicate how cultural common-sense knowledge about life course and ageing can be invoked in the conversations with a radio psychologist. Our initial interest in the topic of age in these radio conversations was the result of an observation that callers' age was invoked often and in different ways in the programme. A hypothesis was developed that the practice of invoking callers' ages is meaningful and serves particular interactional purposes in radio counselling. It is noteworthy, for instance, that in call-in opinion programmes or musical programmes in which listeners phone in to express their opinions about contemporary social and political matters or to request a song, the callers are not usually asked about their age. By contrast, an enquiry about a caller's age sounds more appropriate in the context of a call-in programme where a doctor gives advice on health issues. The paper's specific focus is on how callers' chronological age is referred to in the conversations with a radio psychologist when negotiating an understanding of the callers' troubles. Namely, the study aims to explicate how age references may be used to position callers as members of particular stage-of-life categories, and to invoke expectations tied to those specific categories in order to reason about the callers' troubles. We will start with a brief account on current knowledge about cultural constructions of the life course and life stages, as well as discursive approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, and will then proceed to examine age reference as an interpretative device in radio counselling.

Our point of departure is that a helping relationship, such as counselling and psychotherapy, is a collaborative interpretative work between a professional and a client with the aim of understanding the client's problem. One interpretative resource used to make sense of human actions and states, is ‘life course’ (Gubrium, Holstein, & Buckholdt, 1994). The term ‘life course’ labels the Western world's view of life as a series of developments and events common for most people, which is a way of understanding human experience in relation to time. From this social constructionist perspective, life course and stages of ageing are categories that people use to describe their worlds; they are interpretations discursively established and assigned to experience (Gubrium et al., 1994). A way of interpreting actors' qualities, actions, and states by reference to their location in the life course is a practice of ‘life coursing’, which entails comparison of one's actions to the idealised and practical actions of others at the same ‘point’ in the life course (Rosenfeld and Gallagher, 2002, Rosenfeld et al., 2016). Such references to age expectations create images of being ‘on time’ or ‘off time’, which may be used to attribute normality or deviance (Gubrium et al., 1994). This is due to age being tied to notions about proper life timing and appropriate behaviour at different life stages (Settersten and Hägestad, 1996a, Settersten and Hägestad, 1996b).

Studies of social–cultural constructions of the life course and specific life stages have revealed how members of Western societies rely on typifications to make sense of their own and others' experiences in relation to time (e.g. Gubrium et al., 1994). The typical life course is constructed as a linear development from childhood and youth, positively perceived as an upward curve to adulthood, through adult life, into the downward path to old age (Hockey & James, 1993). The central part of the life course – adulthood – is conceptualised as an embodiment of independence and autonomy, while its extreme ends – childhood and old age – are understood as separate from and marginal to adulthood. This picture of the life course is hierarchical, where certain positions are privileged over others (Rosenfeld & Gallagher, 2002). Hockey and James (1993) have shown, for instance, that in Western societies children have been historically constructed as vulnerably dependent and ‘incompetent’ social actors, and that this cultural construction has acquired a metaphorical role in framing dependency of other marginalised groups, including elderly people (e.g. in treating elderly people as if they were children).

The taken-for-granted assumptions and ideas about ageing are culture-specific and constitute products of current dominant ideologies. As Lock, 1993, Lock, 1994 has demonstrated in her comparative study of menopause in Japan and North America, subjective interpretations of physical changes in the body are culturally produced and therefore differ in different cultural contexts. Knowledge about the body and biological ageing is a product of history and culture, and sensations in the body registered by the brain transform into their subjective interpretations through the mediating force of culture (Lock, 1993). Moreover, particular life stages, such as adolescence, appear to be a modern social construct that imposes particular constraints on the respective group and portrays specific experiences as inevitable and inescapable; thus, adolescents are persistently depicted as a group at risk, the members of which are unstable due to hormonal changes and therefore unable to develop conscious decision-making characteristics (Lesko, 2012).

Developmental phases, stages and sequences are tools used to make sense of human experience, as well as products of the interpretative practice. The meanings attached to life change are produced and organised in and through interaction, in particular by means of references to age-related stages that “descriptively accomplish” life change (Gubrium et al., 1994, p. 29). Descriptions of someone as old, young or middle-aged constitute in this respect “constructive actions” (Gubrium et al., 1994, p. 31), through which, on the one hand, meaning is assigned to experiences, and, on the other hand, the categories are continuously constituted and updated.

In recent decades, a growing number of age research studies have emphasised discourse and language use. Discursive research into age, similar to the social constructionist approach, underlines the distinction between ‘chronological age’ as a historical (objective) fact and ‘age category’, which is explained by references to social norms and the expectations associated with particular life stages (for example, clothing style, hair colour, posture, or social roles) (Laz, 1998, p. 93). In the discursive studies, the life span is approached as a “set of culturally specific and linguistically ascribed categories” (Coupland & Ylanne-McEwen, 1993), while age-related identities are studied as socially-produced discursive achievements rather than static individual features or products of cognitive processes.

In this study, we adopt ‘the identity-in-action tradition’ (Nikander, 2002), where age is understood as being performed and accomplished in talk. Studies that focus on age-as-an-interactional-accomplishment show how age identities and their specific features can be invoked in order to perform particular interactional tasks, such as suggesting and negotiating interpretative frameworks for understanding events and experiences (e.g. Hurd, 1999, Nikander, 2000, Poulios, 2009, Róin, 2014, Rosenfeld, 1999). This approach allows detecting, through details of talk, how age-related categories are oriented to as ‘inference-rich’ (Sacks, 1992, Schegloff, 2007c), i.e. how they are used to invoke cultural norms that incorporate prescriptions and proscriptions for behaviour (Settersten and Hägestad, 1996a, Settersten and Mayer, 1997). In the present study, we show how categorial work can be embedded in particular therapeutic tasks, namely in searching for and negotiating¹ explanations and remedies for troublesome experiences. The research focus on particular discursive actions allows for the tracing of how meaning of age and ageing is constructed in talk (Nikander, 2009). It reveals the social organisation of cultural knowledge (Stokoe, 2009) as well as the ways in which conversation participants collaboratively preserve or revise ‘categorial common sense’ (Atkinson, 1980, Stokoe, 2010).

Gubrium et al. (1994) argue that a wide range of human-service professionals, including psychiatrists, police, educators, and social workers, relate to the idea of “being on or off time” to discern normality and deviance. Likewise, Rosenfeld and Gallagher (2002) observe that the life course is a central interpretative and organising resource in medicine, where “the very criteria for health are age-stratified” (p. 358). For instance, a criterion of productivity is applied to the health of middle-aged persons, but not to the health of older people. In this respect, age categories work as ‘shortcut reasoning’ in interpreting patients' and clients' troubles and legitimising professional decisions (Jacobsson, 2014). When professionals draw on the assumptions about the typical life course in their expert judgements, they also enact and reproduce the constructions of the life course (Rosenfeld & Gallagher, 2002). Through the process of ongoing production and updating the life course constructions, corresponding inferences are made socially acceptable (e.g. dependency of older people).

Counselling and psychotherapy constitute institutional settings in which a professional and a client collaboratively construct an account of the client's difficult situation. Problem formulation is considered to be a crucial part of psychotherapeutic and counselling work (Peyrot, 1987, Scheff, 1984). The initial description of the trouble that is presented by the client is transformed during his or her conversation with a psychotherapist or a counsellor into an expert-informed formulation of the problem.² A number of studies have shown, for instance, that therapists and counsellors challenge and restructure the client's initial interpretation of his or her problem in order to shift the focus towards the client's ‘inner world’ (e.g. Antaki et al., 2005, Hodges, 2002, Madill et al., 2001). While a client's complaints are often directed towards other people (e.g. spouses or family members), the counsellors problematise the client's own conduct and psychological characteristics. At the same time, the client is not a passive observer of the process of reformulation of his or her trouble description by the professional. In fact, collaboration between the therapist and the client in the construction of the client's problem may be decisive in terms of the outcome of the helping relationship (Madill et al., 2001).

The discursive shift that is fundamental to the therapeutic process may involve re-categorising components of the problem description (O'Neill & LeCouteur, 2014). Age is one of the key bases for production of self-image and social identity (Hockey & James, 2003), and the ‘natural life course’ may be used as a schema of interpretation in psychotherapeutic practice (Atkinson, 1980). However, to our knowledge, there have been no studies directly focusing on and exploring in interactional detail how age categories can be invoked in counselling or psychotherapy as explanatory or interpretative tools. The few studies that address the use of membership categories in counselling and therapeutic interactions demonstrate that membership categories, including age categories, can be invoked in these settings for different purposes. In radio counselling, the callers might identify themselves in categorial terms to provide an intelligible description of the trouble, for example by saying, “I am a fifteen-year-old girl, and my boyfriend would like to have intercourse with me” (Ten Have, 1999, Ten Have, 2000). In therapy work with a family with a disabled child, stage-of-life categories, such as ‘adolescence’, may be used to substitute ‘disability’ categories in order to negotiate a less problematic version of the family situation (O'Neill & LeCouteur, 2014).

In this study we aim to explicate in interactional detail how reference to one's position in the life course can be used to explore troublesome experiences. Specifically, we focus on how chronological age of callers to the radio counselling programme is invoked to infer age-related interpretations of the troubles. Because chronological ages mark entry and exit points to life stages, and the associated social roles (Hockey & James, 2003), age references may be used in interaction to invoke common-sense knowledge and shared cultural norms (Nikander, 2009, Schegloff, 2007a). In our study we will show how age references can be used to invoke cultural scripts of being in a particular age to establish a ‘shared argumentative space’ (Nikander, 2009, p. 868) between a radio psychologist and a caller when negotiating intersubjective understanding of the caller's trouble.

The study draws on an ethnomethodological approach and in particular on conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA). Among other things, CA and MCA have proven to be useful for analysing how age identities are negotiated and constructed through talk-in-interaction (Nikander, 2000, Nikander, 2002, Poulios, 2009). Using a combination of CA and MCA allows one to trace and describe how conversation participants use categories to invoke common-sense knowledge in order to achieve interactional goals. The CA approach has also been useful in research on psychotherapy (e.g. Peräkylä, 2013, Peräkylä et al., 2008, Voutilainen, 2010) and counselling (e.g. Silverman, 1997). Both CA and MCA have been applied to studying the process of problem formulation in psychotherapy (e.g. Madill et al., 2001, O'Neill and LeCouteur, 2014).