Creating deliberation in the context of social conflict: the examination of mediator practices for shaping an interactivity in dispute mediation

The dissertation explored how deliberative activity is constructed within ongoing social conflict. The study examined mediator actions for keeping the disputants on task – that is, on negotiating plans about caring for their children. This focus enabled an empirical investigation of three interrelated theoretical interests: (1) how an institutionally preferred form of interactivity is constructed in the ongoing course of interaction, (2) the role of the mediator as an ostensible designer of communication activity, and (3) the relationship between interaction and reasoning. An existing collection of 18 transcripts from audio recordings of mediation sessions at a mediation center in the western United States served as a source of interactional data. The participants of mediation sessions were eight mediators and 17 divorcing or divorced couples. The main focus of observation was on mediator communicative practices for keeping disputants on task. These were observed by attending to the word choices of mediators and their language actions evident across a corpus of transcripts. As the dialogue quality is a mutual achievement of all the participants, not just the mediator, the center of attention was also on different linguistic and interactional resources disputants provide in the course of interaction. The simple categories were useful for getting at higher order concepts such as topics and dialogue activities. There were four main findings from the empirical study. First, an institutionally preferred form of interactivity is constructed ongoing, often implicit, negotiation of what is on or off task through the uses of linguistic and interactional “materials” available in the moment to the participants. Second, mediators’ uses of language to make references, establish topics, and launch dialogue activities are design moves that signal what is on-task and thus articulate the deliberative activity. Third, mediators construct their interventions in such a way as to balance concerns for face and the institutional goal for interaction. Fourth, argument and reasoning are constituted through interaction that imposes various constraints on what contributions are appropriate in mediation talk.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Alena L. Vasilyev