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Rebecca Barnes

Publications and source records attributed to Rebecca Barnes.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

When psychotherapists disclose personal information about themselves to clients.

Psychotherapists sometimes disclose personal information to their clients during therapeutic sessions. We report here our analysis of how these 'therapist self-disclosures' are done. In a sample of 15 sessions involving four therapists, we find that all therapists use them sparingly and some not at all. When they do, they 'match' something in the client's preceding turn. Vehicles for the match can range from comparatively simple agreements to more complicated 'second stories', which use analogies from the therapists' own current life. We find that these 'personal' disclosures are invariably rather ordinary but are made to bear visibly on the therapeutic business at hand, though not always in obvious ways. The ordinariness of therapist's self-disclosures underpins what seems to be one of their main actions-to 'normalize', for a number of disparate local interactional contingencies, the clients' experience. We discuss the practice of using one's own life experiences to bear on one's client's troubles, noting the recurrent features of extreme case formulations and explicit recipient design. We conclude with a brief discussion of the relation between our analyses and those which might be offered by members of the therapeutic community.

Communication↗
PubMed2005

Self-disclosure as a situated interactional practice.

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the degree of acquaintance with the disclosed-to recipient, the expectation of reciprocity and so on), or manipulated as a causative independent variable (which affects such things as the perception of the discloser, the effectiveness of therapy, and so on). This treatment of self-disclosure, embedded in a research culture of a-contextual, experimenter-defined phenomena, risks missing the point that in ordinary life, self-disclosure is a social performance which must be brought off in interaction, and has its interactional context and its interactional consequences. When we examine examples of such brought-off disclosures, we start to see patterns in their design as voluntary revelations of personal data, and patterns in their social function, which are invisible to the standard factors and measures paradigm of experimental social psychology.

Humans↗
PubMed2004

Citizenship in practice.

The idea of citizenship dates back to classical antiquity. It was originally concerned to address legitimacy of occupancy in the public sphere. Our empirical study contributes to the project of developing a social psychology of the citizen by focusing on the dynamics of such membership, specifically rights and identities. The authors briefly describe a number of existing psychological models of the citizen. Drawing on the main theoretical principles of discursive psychology, rather than asking, 'who is the citizen?' in terms of mental states, we suggest a shift in focus to the more social question, 'how do people claim citizenship and to what ends?'. We present an analysis of private letters of complaint that formed part of a larger mixed data set used in a recent research programme centred on disputes over Britain's newer travellers' rights of settlement. Specifically our analysis demonstrates how some of the letter writers generate a basis for claims-making by making relevant a citizenship/ governance alignment of identities. We also demonstrate how the entitlements associated with the category citizen are built up and action-oriented rather than flowing from the (unproblematic) assumption of citizenship. Finally we discuss how citizenship can be used for the purposes of inclusion and exclusion.

Civil Rights↗