Narrating in protective order interviews: A source of interactional trouble

Abstract

This study examines the types of interactional trouble that arise from narrative variation in institutional interviews. Specifically, we examine protective order interviews in which Latina women tell of domestic violence to paralegal interviewers charged with the duty of helping them obtain a protective order. Victims' narratives are shown to take different shapes, and paralegals respond to them in different pragmalinguistic ways, depending on how they diverge from institutional needs. The factors found most heavily to influence narrative outcomes are contextual ones, related to participant social roles, the type of communicative activity interlocutors perceive themselves to be engaged in, and their interactional goals. An additional finding is that when expectations of what constitutes appropriate speech behavior differ, the interlocutor holding greater institutional power will try to constrain the speech of the other, despite the fact that both appear to share an extralinguistic goal, in this case obtaining a protective order.