Aligning caller and call-taker
The opening phrase of Dutch emergency calls
This paper reports on conversation analytic research for the Dutch national emergency call-centre. In a corpus study of 120 emergency calls we show that callers’ orientations to their communicative tasks are not aligned to the institutional communicative tasks of the call-takers. In a subsequent workplace experiment involving over 2000 calls, it appeared that the use of an alternative question rather than a wh-question, significantly altered callers’ emergency deliveries and adapted them to call-takers’ communicative needs. The analysis shows two aspects of callers’ responses to the different question formats: (i) The alternative questions produced significantly more type-conforming answers than the wh-questions, and also (ii) callers treated their non-conforming answer to alternative question more often as dispreferred than their non-conforming answers to wh-questions. Callers thus treated the preference for type-conformity to be stronger for alternative questions than for wh-questions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- Emergency call organization
- 2.Emergency calls and questions
- 3.Data and methods
- Conversation Analysis
- Measuring effectiveness
- 4.What makes a call long?
- What is a ‘long’ call?
- Why are calls long?
- 5.A new opening phrase
- Results of the experiment
- Type-conforming answers of wh-questions and alternative questions
- 6.Conclusion
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References
This article is currently available as a sample article.
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.8.1.07koo
References
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