Epistemic struggles in addiction therapeutic community meetings

In this study I analyse Therapeutic Community (TC) group meetings for persons with drug addiction problems. Using the method of Conversation Analysis, I specifically focus on practices of knowledge management and sharing between the educators and clients of a TC in Italy. As part of their institutional remit, the educators encourage the clients to report information on their activities and to disclose aspects of their inner experience. This can lead to epistemic struggles, in which the clients resist providing information and the educators seek to overcome such resistance by making claims of pre-existing knowledge about the clients’ experience. After describing the design and sequential positioning of such claims, I argue that their use is functional to manage one of the dilemmas that characterise the educators’ professional practice

Responses to indirect complaints as restricted activities in Therapeutic Community meetings

In this chapter I investigate how the staff members of a mental health Therapeutic Community in Italy avoid displays of affiliation in response to residents’ indirect (or third party) complaints. I show how this restriction can be embodied in different practices: ignoring a resident’s turn carrying a possible complaint, avoiding attending the complaint-components of a resident’s turn, and disaffiliating with a resident’s complaint. I also discuss a deviant case in which affiliation is produced and is later treated by the staff members as a problematic stance to be produced following a resident’s complaint. I argue that through a restriction on affiliation the staff members implement the institutionally-relevant identity of intermediaries, whose task is to encourage the residents’ compliance to the decisions of absent third parties

The inclusion of students with dyslexia in higher education: a systematic review using narrative synthesis

This article reports on a study focusing on the inclusion of students with dyslexia in higher education (HE). A systematic review was carried out to retrieve, critically appraise and synthesize the available evidence on how the inclusion of students with dyslexia can be fostered in HE. The 15 studies included in the final synthesis employed descriptive designs and overwhelmingly used qualitative methods to explore dyslexic students’ perceptions on the impact of teaching, support and accommodation in their own learning experience. A critical appraisal of these studies revealed a landscape of significant gaps in the available stock of evidence on the inclusion of students with dyslexia in HE. The synthesis of the available evidence is presented in a narrative of five cross-study thematic areas: student coping strategies, being identified as dyslexic, interaction with academic staff, accessibility and accommodations, and using assistive technologies and information and communication technologies. Implications for practice and future research are discussed

Beyond neutrality: professionals’ responses to clients’ indirect complaints in a Therapeutic Community for people with a diagnosis of mental illness

Previous research has evidenced that in different institutional settings professionals are cautious when responding to clients’ indirect complaints and tend to avoid siding either with the clients/ complainants or the complained-of absent parties. In this article we use the method of Conversation Analysis to explore professional responses to clients’ indirect complaints in the context of a Therapeutic Community (TC) for people with diagnoses of mental illness in Italy. Although the TC staff members sometimes display a neutral orientation toward the clients’ complaints, as is the case in other institutional settings, in some instances they take a stance toward the clients’ complaints, either by distancing themselves or by overtly disaffiliating from them. We argue that these practices reflect the particular challenges of an institutional setting in which professionals engage with clients on a daily basis, have an institutional mandate of watching over them and are responsible for their safety. According to this interpretation, staff members’ non-neutrality toward clients’ complaints can be seen as a way of defending against the possibility, raised by the clients’ reports, that the staff members might be involved, albeit indirectly, in courses of action that have harmed or might harm the clients

Conversational pursuit of medication compliance in a Therapeutic Community for persons diagnosed with mental disorders

Purpose: In this article, we contribute to the debate on medication compliance by exploring the conversational "technologies" entailed in the process of promoting clients’ adherence to psychopharmacological prescriptions. Using a case study approach, we explore how medication-related problems are dealt with in conversational interaction between the staff members and the clients of a mental health Therapeutic Community (TC) in Italy. Method: Four meetings between two staff members (Barbara and Massimo) and the clients of the TC were audiorecorded. The data were transcribed and analyzed using the method of Conversation Analysis. Results: Barbara and Massimo recur to practices of topic articulation to promote talk that references the clients’ failure to take the medications. Through these practices they deal with the practical problem of mobilizing the clients’ cooperation in courses of action that fit into the institutional agenda of fostering medication adherence. Conclusions: Barbara and Massimo’s conversational practices appear to reflect the assumption that medication-related problems can be reduced to compliance problems. This assumption works to make the clients accountable for their failure to take the medications while shaping a conversational environment that is unreceptive to their complaints about side effects. Implications for the understanding of mental health rehabilitation practice in TCs are discussed

Problem formulation in mental health residential treatment: a single case analysis

This paper investigates an episode of interaction in a mental health residential centre in Italy, where a resident and a staff member manage a relational problem. The episode leads to an apparently paradoxical outcome: in spite of the fact that the resident has sought the staff members’ cooperation to make sense of the relational problem, she ends up being blamed for that problem. Adopting the approach of conversation analysis, the paper shows that this outcome is the result of the transition from a relational view, to a one-sided view of the problem. The practices employed to accomplish this transition reflect a set of contrasting concerns and goals, which the participants bring to bear on the interaction. Reflection about these aspects can sensitize the public to some of the intricacies and challenges entailed in the delivery of mental health residential treatment

Theoretical and practical validation tests for a near-field to far-field transformation algorithm using spherical wave expansion

The use of spherical wave expansion of the solution of the wave equation to predict Far-Field values from data measured in the Near-Field region is a well known technique, typically used to perform antenna measurements in compact anechoic chambers. However, when designing the computing algorithm it is fundamental to validate the results and to quantify the numerical error of the method. In this regard, a computer application that samples the electric Near-Field and calculates the values of the electric Far-Field region using spherical wave expansion was developed to measure antenna radiation patterns in the Fresnel zone inside a fully anechoic chamber. In order to validate the code, this paper describes three validation methods: firstly, using the theoretical electric Near-Field values of an infinitesimal dipole as the input to the algorithm to compare the output with the response analytically expected; secondly, using a Far-Field electric field data of a calibrated half wavelength dipole measured in an anechoic chamber and finally, using an electric Near-Field data of a calibrated half wavelength dipole measured in the same chamber. These methods provide simple procedures to calculate the error introduced by the code in different scenarios that should be considered to estimate the measurement uncertainty.Postprint (published version

Development of goal-directed action selection guided by intrinsic motivations: an experiment with children

Action selection is extremely important, particularly when the accomplishment of competitive tasks may require access to limited motor resources. the spontaneous exploration of the world plays a fundamental role in the development of this capacity, providing subjects with an increasingly diverse set of opportunities to acquire, practice and refine the understanding of action-outcome connection. the computational modeling literature proposed a number of specific mechanisms for autonomous agents to discover and target interesting outcomes: intrinsic motivations hold a central importance among those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the study of the acquisition of action-outcome relation was mostly carried out with experiments involving extrinsic tasks, either based on rewards or on predefined task goals. this work presents a new experimental paradigm to study the effect of intrinsic motivation on action-outcome relation learning and action selection during free exploration of the world. three- and four-year-old children were observed during the free exploration of a new toy: half of them were allowed to develop the knowledge concerning its functioning; the other half were not allowed to learn anything. the knowledge acquired during the free exploration of the toy was subsequently assessed and compared

Delivering criticism through anecdotes in interaction

Criticising someone’s conduct is a disaffiliative action that can attract recipient objections, particularly in the form of defensive detailing by which the recipient volunteers extenuating circumstances that undermine the criticism. In Therapeutic Community (TC) meetings for clients with drug addiction, support staff regularly criticise clients’ behaviours that violate therapeutic principles or norms of conduct. This study examines cases where, rather than criticising a client’s behaviour directly, TC staff members do so indirectly through an anecdote: a case illustrating the inappropriateness of the type of conduct of which the client’s behaviour is an instantiation. TC staff members design the anecdote to convey a principle or norm of conduct which the client has putatively violated, and they systematically pursue endorsement of that principle by the client. By constructing the anecdote as an exemplary case, distanced from the individual client’s personal experience, TC staff members make it an empirically unverifiable, elf-evident, and therefore hard to challenge, llustration of a norm