‘‘SOS 112 what has occurred?’’ : Managing openings in children’s emergency calls

Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2012) 183–202

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‘‘SOS 112 what has occurred?’’ Managing openings in children’semergency calls

Jakob Cromdal a,n, Daniel Persson-Thunqvist b, Karin Osvaldsson c

a Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linkoping University, Sweden, 60174 Norrkoping, Swedenb Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linkoping University, Linkoping, Swedenc Department of Child Studies, Linkoping University, Linkoping, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 14 April 2012

Received in revised form

1 October 2012

Accepted 1 October 2012Available online 11 October 2012

Keywords:

Children’s interactions

Children’s participation

Emergency calls

Ethnomethodology

Talk-in-interaction

Telephone calls

58/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A

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esponding author. Tel.: þ46 11 363618.

ail address: [email protected] (J. Cromdal)

though this seems to be the routine organisat

w see Persson-Thunqvist et al., 2008).

a b s t r a c t

This article examines the initial exchanges in calls to the Swedish emergency services, focusing on

callers’ responses to the standardised opening phrase SOS one one two, what has occurred?. Comparisons

across three age groups – children, teenagers, and adults – revealed significant differences in caller

behaviour. Whereas teenagers and adults offered reports of the incident, child callers were more prone

to request dispatch of specific assistance units. This pattern was only observable when children were

accompanied by an adult relative, which leads us to propose that child callers may be operating under

prior adult instruction concerning how to request help. The second part of the analysis examines the

local organisation of participants’ actions, showing how turn-design and sequencing manifest the local

concerns of the two parties. The analysis thus combines quantitative and qualitative methods to

explore the ways through which the parties jointly produce an early sense of emergency incidents.

These results are discussed in terms of children’s agency and competence as informants granted to

them by emergency operators, and how such competence ascriptions run against commonsense

conceptualisations of children as less-than-full-fledged members of society.

& 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Although children’s participation in society’s affairs is subject to much theorising (e.g., James et al., 1998; James and James, 2004),surprisingly few attempts have been made to empirically explore children’s agency in real-life encounters with the public services. Thisarticle highlights some features of children’s participation in service related telephone calls by examining how young callers accomplishopening sequences when calling for emergency assistance.

Overwhelmingly, emergency calls stand out for their brevity and topically narrow focus (e.g., Wakin and Zimmerman, 1999;Zimmerman, 1992a) and count as an instance of highly specialised and goal-oriented institutional talk. Their structure can be brokendown into five distinct phases (Zimmerman, 1992b): (1) opening and identification of the trouble; (2) request for assistance;(3) interrogative series; (4) response; and (5) closing.1 It is fair to say that the opening exchanges have received far more researchattention than the other phases of the calls, which may be taken to indicate the institutional significance of the initial alignment of thetype of business and concerns that the two parties bring to the interaction (cf. Cromdal et al., 2008; Whalen and Zimmerman, 1990). Oneinstitutionally specific feature of emergency call openings is that operators tend to hear the very summons as a token of the caller’s needfor help. That is to say, their pre-beginning orientation towards every call is to treat it as a virtual emergency (Zimmerman, 1992b). Afurther characteristic of emergency calls is the specialisation of the operators’ opening phrase (Whalen and Zimmerman, 1987), whichidentifies the institution as, specifically, an emergency assistance service. A third feature of emergency call openings is their reduction tostrictly service-relevant topics (e.g., Whalen and Zimmerman, 1987), characterised for instance by the absence (or occasionally displayedavoidance) of greetings and other mutual courtesies, that are commonplace in mundane telephone calls (Schegloff, 1986a, b).

Such elements of reduction and specialisation provide for a normative organisation of the opening exchange, where the operator’sidentification of the service creates an expectation for the caller to use the very first topical slot to state her/his reason for calling, wherethat reason is already taken to be an urgent need of emergency assistance. In other words, the organisation of the opening sequence isgeared towards the parties ‘‘achieving an institutionally constrained focus to the talk’’ (Whalen and Zimmerman, 1987, p. 175) already

ll rights reserved.

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ion of emergency calls across the western countries, some variation of the basic structures has been reported (for an

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J. Cromdal et al. / Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2012) 183–202184

from the outset, and Cromdal et al. (2012) point to the procedural consequentiality of two different opening routines in the work ofSwedish emergency rescue operators. In this article, we ask how such focus is achieved in calls phoned in by children who report on avariety of emergency incidents.

The present article builds squarely on previous work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, which has a longstandinginterest in explicating the accountable features of members’ practical reasoning and organisation of action in a range of work settings,including those where members of the general public engage with professional representatives of service organisations (e.g., Drew andHeritage, 1992; Sacks, 1992, vol. 1; Watson, 1986; Wowk, 1989). Our analysis contributes to prior work on service-relatedtelecommunications (cf. Edwards, 2007) by focusing on children’s use of a dedicated telephone service. In highlighting the practicalconcerns of young callers and by showing how such concerns are being manifested and handled as part of the routine work of call-taking,this article also contributes to a broader scope of sociological inquiry into children’s participation in society’s business (e.g. Cahill, 2010;Clemente, 2009; Cromdal, 2009; Hutchby, 2010; Silverman et al., 1998; Speier, 1976, Thornborrow, 1998; Waksler, 1996).

2. Children’s calls for assistance

There is a small but growing body of work on children’s calls to telephone-operated help lines, showing from within interactionalevents how callers and call-takers routinely draw upon commonsense categories, expectations, and a variety of skills and competencieswhen engaging with one another (Potter and Hepburn, 2003; Emmison and Danby, 2007a, b; Danby and Emmison, in press, Osvaldssonet al., in press/2013). Drawing on previous work on the opening interactions in emergency calls, some of these studies examine how thecall takers’ identification of the service and the callers’ presentation of their trouble are managed to establish a joint topic for the call.

Of particular interest for our purposes is Emmison and Danby’s (2007a) analysis of the opening exchanges in calls to the Australian ‘‘KidsHelp Line’’ (henceforth KHL), in which they observed that the callers’ first presentation of trouble does not necessarily render their reasonfor the call. Rather, the specific reason for calling the service typically follows upon an initial narrative account of some past event(s). Thisorder of presentation of the callers’ business differs from what has been previously found in emergency calls, and Emmison and Danby(2007a) suggest that it may be a result of the different opening routines used by call takers across the two services. Specifically, the KHL calltakers start out on the formula /greetingþ institutional identificationS (typically ‘‘Hi there, Kids Help Line’’) which does not immediatelyprompt callers to specify their need for help. Thus, in contrast to much of the work on openings in emergency calls, Emmison and Danby’s(2007a) analysis proposes to ‘problematise[.] the idea of the ‘‘reason for the call’’ as the sole conceptual device for characterizing the corebusiness performed in call openings.’ (p. 24).

Naturally, the work of emergency assistance operators differs in important respects from that of call takers of a counselling service. Forinstance, the KHL call takers do not ordinarily deal directly with matters of life and death, nor do they have any means of dispatchingpersonnel to assist the caller; so the type of help they may offer is never – quite contrary to the emergency operator – to ‘‘send somebodyover’’. But perhaps more than anything, the work of the two institutions differs in the potential degree of urgency.

We will return to these matters in the second part of the analysis. However, it needs bearing in mind that our analytical interest is notstrictly with comparing children’s emergency calls with their engagement in other services accessible via telephone. Rather, we seek toexamine how young callers deal with the routinised aspects of the opening sequences as they report on a variety of emergency incidents.Therefore, we will draw on studies of young persons seeking other types of assistance only insofar as this may highlight theinstitutionally specific concerns of the parties involved in producing and receiving emergency reports. Our analysis starts out by a simplecomparison of two different types of call openings across three age groups of callers, then proceedes to explore in some detail theinteraction taking place in these different opening sequences to examine the participants’ lay and professional orientations as well as thelocal concerns that can be shown to inform their actions.

3. Methods and materials

The present study is drawn from a larger research project dealing with social interaction in children’s calls to the Swedish emergencyservices, SOS-Alarm. Our corpus currently holds over 120 real-life calls coming in through the emergency number 112 to one of the smallerdispatch centres. The calls were collected over a period of three years, which included over 200 days of fieldwork at the dispatch centre,during which the authors would listen in to the unceasing stream of incoming calls and learning about the practice of call taking and dispatchwork (see also Cromdal et al., 2008).

3.1. Corpus and categorisation

For the purposes of this study, we examine a subset of 40 calls with children, focusing in particular on the participants’ very first actionsafter the line has been opened.2 For comparative purposes, we also examine the opening actions in adults’ calls (44 calls) as well as in callsphoned in by teenagers (38 calls). The assignment into the two age groups ‘‘children’’ and ‘‘teenagers’’ was carried out either by operatorstogether with the researchers simultaneously listening to the calls or, in the absence of researchers at the centre, by the operatorsthemselves, who were previously asked to tag all the calls that they have received from callers from the two age groups. For comparativepurposes, the researchers also tagged a collection of calls from adults.3 All the tagged calls were then retrieved electronically from the

2 In the case of multiple calls reporting on the same event, we only include the opening sequences of the first call, as subsequent calls concerning an incident which is

already being processed are often treated differently than first reports. The reason for this is of course that much of the relevant information may already be known to the

operator, and dispatch activities may already be initiated.3 The general principle for including calls into this group was to represent the entire span of adult life (including young adults, middle aged persons as well as senior

citizens—these assessments were continously discussed by the operator and researcher listening in to calls), as well as a broad scope of incidents, including for example,

burglaries, fires, traffic- and workplace accidents, and a variety of purely medical (i.e., non-accidnet) emergencies.

J. Cromdal et al. / Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2012) 183–202 185

SOS data base,4 either by the operations supervisor at the local dispatch centre or by an operations technician at the Stockholmheadquarters.

Because the primary interest of emergency dispatchers is with certain details about the person in need of help (who would mostly becategorised as ‘‘patient’’ or ‘‘victim’’, depending on the nature of the incident), the operators in our corpus seldom inquired about the ageof the caller, unless of course the caller was the patient/victim him- or herself. The assignment of the calls into the three stage-of-lifegroups is therefore mostly based on audible cues. If taken as factual information, the operators’ assessments of the callers’ age becomepossibly problematic. Not only is there a risk that an operator can simply misjudge the caller’s age; there are also documented instanceswhere, for various reasons, callers would lie about their age, so there is the possible element of deception. However, what is at stake forthe present study is not the chronological age of each caller, but rather the social identity ascribed to her or him by the operator. As wehave already mentioned, our task is with the mutual – and mutually displayed – work of producing and receiving reports of emergencyincidents. What counts then is not how old callers actually are, but rather what age-identity that is being produced in, for, and as a resultof the unfolding interaction. In effect, the partitioning of the corpus into the three stage-of-life categories is a participants’achievement—it reflects (however roughly) the operators’ situated notions of the type of person that they are dealing with in thecourse of a call.5

3.2. Focus and modes of analysis

The interest in the opening negotiations between the caller and operator is rooted in the relatively well-documented idea that there arecommonsense notions regarding ‘‘callers-to-emergency-dispatch’’ and ‘‘emergency operators’’ that carry particular cultural expectations on theformer party to report on, or request help with, certain forms of trouble and on the latter to receive the report and under certain conditionssupply the help requested by the former. However, at the outset of the call these identities are merely putative—they have to be worked outthroughout the course of each call. And that work crucially begins with the very first moments of interaction. As Zimmerman (1992a) points out,‘‘The opening turns of the call, and in particular the components of the first turns of answerer and caller, regularly establish an identity setimplicative for the nature of the business to follow’’ (p. 49–50). Our analytic focus extends roughly to the point at which the parties havedemonstrably established the caller’s reason for calling the emergency number, and are beginning to attend other business. In an importantsense, our focus on the opening sequences of the calls allows us to investigate, in the words of Sacks, ‘‘how beginnings work to get frombeginnings to something else’’ (Sacks, 1992, vol. 2, p. 15).

We start out with a brief comparative analysis examining quantitatively how different age groups of callers respond to the operators’opening phrase ‘‘SOS one one two, what has occurred?’’. The reason for breaking down the corpus into different age groups is grounded inthe initial observation in our data that not all callers seem to respond to the operators’ query. The quantifications are mounted on twotypes of action in which callers engage following upon the operators’ response to the summons: (1) descriptions of trouble and(2) requests for help. While clearly in majority, these two analytic categories do not fully account for the opening sequences in thecorpus. For this reason, a third category, labelled ‘‘other openings’’, collects a variety of actions in which callers may first engage. Wediscuss these categories in more detail in the course of the analysis.

The quantitative part of this study is followed by an extensive qualitative analysis focusing on the opening sequences in children’semergency reports. To this end, we build on prior work in conversation analysis, examining the sequential and categorial organisationsof the participants’ actions by explicating in detail their procedures for building and coordinating turns at talk (e.g., Goodwin, 1979;Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2007).

4. Responding to a standardised opening: A comparative analysis

According to the policy of the Swedish emergency dispatch agency, SOS Alarm, all calls coming in through the emergency number 112have to be answered using the standard phrase ‘‘SOS ett ett tva, vad har intraffat?’’, which literarily translates as: ‘‘SOS one one two, what has

ocurred?’’. Clearly, the first element, combining the internationally recognised phrase SOS with the emergency number 112, offers acategorial identification of the institution. As Sacks (1972) pointed out, the inferential potential of membership categories allows membersto identify certain practices, actions and attributes as naturally related to the incumbent of a category. Hence, the categorial identification ofthe emergency services allows the caller to infer a certain range of services provided by this institution and to ‘‘hear’’ that the respondingoperator – accountably responding on behalf of the institution – is able to execute this range of services (see Watson, 1986). The secondelement of this turn comprises a question, ‘‘what has ocurred?’’, which concludes the operator’s opening line. If we see the first element asretrospectively oriented, as the operator’s response to the summons (cf. Schegloff, 1968), then the second element is clearly prospective: itcomprises the first pair-part of a question-answer sequence. Hence, the conditionally relevant next action is for the caller to supply ananswer to the query—to tell the operator ‘‘what has ocurred’’. The formal phrasing, using the term ‘‘intraffat’’/‘‘occurred’’, rather than, say,‘‘hant’’/’’happened’’, is designed precisely to highlight the formal status of the emergency dispatch agency – to provide operators with ameans of ‘‘doing authority’’ from the very beginning of the call – and to direct the future course of calls in specific ways.6 One of theexpected outcomes of this formal opening is to reduce the scope of relevant ‘‘occurrences’’. Evidently, a number of events come to pass atany point in time, but only a select portion of them would qualify as tellable in response to the emergency operator’s question.

4 Swedish law requires that all calls coming in through the emergency number 112 be recorded and stored for three months to allow for subsequent incident and/or

criminal investigations.5 Some readers may nonetheless entertain a need for precise information regarding the age of each and every caller. We therefore wish to reiterate that most of the

time, and for a number of reasons including for instance urgency and relevance for dispatch work, the operators themselves lack such information about the caller. Yet

somehow the work of dispatching ambulances, fire trucks, and so on, does take place, mostly with overwhelmingly positive results. It is precisely this somehow that is in

focus for our research.6 This information was given to us during several talks with the managing officials of the SOS Alarm Stockholm headquarters. Similar notions may be found in the

training materials used for in-house training of prospective emergency operators.

Table 1Callers’ opening actions across age groups.

Children Teenagers Adults

Requests 12 (30) 7 (18.5) 11 (25)

Descriptions 14 (35) 26 (68.5) 26 (59)

Other 14 (35) 5 (13) 7 (16)

Tot 40 (100%) 38 (100%) 44 (100%)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Children n=40 Teenagers n=38 Adults n=44

%RequestsDescriptionsOther

Fig. 1. Opening actions across age groups, relative distrubution.


As noted above, previous studies have shown how the opening line of the call taker affects the course of the caller’s first action(s).Accordingly, Whalen and Zimmerman (1987) and Raymond and Zimmerman (2007) observe that in responding to call takers’ openingline, callers to emergency rescue agencies regularly design their first turns in one of the following two action-formats,7 each with theirown implicature for the direction of subsequent interaction:

(1)

7

attem

of ac

have

then

follo8

of th

atten

oper

Requests for assistance—request formats regularly explicate the caller’s acclaimed need for help, often specifying the type ofassistance requested. Requests may be hedged or indirect, e.g., ‘‘Could you send an ambulance to [address]’’ or (less frequently, in ourcorpus) unhedged or direct: ‘‘I want an ambulance’’, or (even less frequently) implied, e.g., ‘‘An ambulance for [address]’’.

(2)
Descriptions of trouble (e.g. ‘‘There is a girl here, she fell off a horse’’). As we show in the a later section, descriptions can be more orless elaborate.
These action types account for most of the opening sequences also in our corpus (96 calls, or 79% of the total corpus).8 However,occasionally callers engage in other forms of action, such as initiate repair, apologise for misdialling, or raise issues of faith, imminent doom,or other concerns which unequivocally fall outside the range of responsibility of the emergency agency. These action types have beencategorised as ‘‘other openings’’ and are further discussed in the final section of the analysis. Let us proceed to examine how the callers inour corpus respond to the standard opening ‘‘SOS one one two, what has occurred?’’. Table 1 shows the distribution of callers’ first actionsacross three age groups:

A w2 analysis across of the callers’ initial actions across the three age groups returned the value of w2(4, n¼122)¼10.72, p o .029. Therelative distribution can be seen in Fig. 1.

As a general observation, the single most common form of opening would entail the caller describing some trouble. As we have notedabove, and will see further on in the analysis, operators routinely ‘‘hear’’ such incident descriptions as requests for help. Furthermore,such descriptions furnish the type of action projected by the operator’s opening phrase, so in this most general sense, the standardopening format does seem to bring about observable procedural consequences. However, as Fig. 1 shows, this seems to be true only oftwo out of the three age groups: while adult and teenage callers mainly start out by reporting an incident, children’s openings are almostevenly distributed across the three types of openings. The difference across the three age groups, while statistically significant, is likely tobe somewhat diffused by the relatively small difference in opening patterns between teenagers and adults. An amalgamated analysis,comparing the children’s openings vs. all other callers, revealed a much more significant difference: w2(2, n¼122)¼9.95, p o .006.

These findings present us with the following problem: How can we account for the observation that children’s first actions do notseem particularly responsive to the operator’s opening turn? To paraphrase, how is it that the operator’s opening question seems toshape the course of action of adult and teenage callers, but not the children? This seems an important matter, because as we will see inthe second part of the analysis, the nature of the incident is the one question that the operators will normally pursue before proceeding

In fact, Whalen and Zimmerman (1987) identify a third category, which they refer to as ‘‘ambient events’’. These comprise situations in which there is no audible

pt to communicate with the call taker. Whalen and Zimmerman show that operators initially attend to such calls, to find out whether they may in fact be indicators

tionable events, such as situations of trouble in which a caller may indeed need assistance but is prevented or otherwise unable to communicate this verbally. We

excluded this category from our analysis, due to a large number of incoming ‘‘pocket calls’’, which are briefly screened for audible signs of trouble by the operators,

terminated, thus leaving no clues as to the existence of a human caller. In very few cases when the caller’s first action is temporarily witheld, but forthcoming

wing on the operator’s prompting, we have categorised the opening according to the type of the caller’s first verbal action, i.e., as a ‘‘request’’, ‘‘report’’ or ‘‘other’’.

Callers’ first turns may also entail other actions such as a greetings, self-identification or locational formulations. However, it is the request for help or the description

e trouble that constitute the central features of the callers’ first turns—they supply the reason for calling, and it is to those actions that operators overwhelmingly

d. In a couple of cases, the caller would both request assistance and produce a description of trouble—the latter serving to account for the former—in which case the

ators would attend to the trouble telling, which led us to categorise it as a description, rather than request.

Table 2Child callers’ opening actions as a function of a present 3rd party.

No 3rd party 3rd party

Requests 3 (18) 9 (39)

Descriptions 8 (47) 6 (26)

Other 6 (35) 8 (35)

Total 17 (100%) 23 (100%)

Table 3Child callers’ opening actions across two types of present 3rd parties.

No 3rd party Third party peer Third party adult relative

Requests 3 (18) 1 (14) 8 (50)

Descriptions 8 (47) 3 (43) 3 (19)

Other 6 (35) 3 (43) 5 (31)

Total 17 (100%) 7 (100%) 16 (100%)


with the call, so until the actual need for help is settled, any other information that the caller may divulge risks prolonging theinterrogation, and delaying an incident response (cf. Cromdal et al., 2008).

One might perhaps suggest that there are broader sociocultural differences between adults and children that cash out in terms of lowerrate of reports/descriptions, due to children’s limited experiences of institutional encounters. It would seem possible that the results reflecta mismatch between the institutional agenda, and young lay callers’ expectations concerning the most efficient way to solicit help(cf. Tracy, 1997, on frames as a source of trouble in calls to emergency). Or maybe there is a developmental explanation: is the phrasing toohard to comprehend?9 While these explanations may seem to reasonably account for the statistical distribution of callers’ opening actions –at least to some extent – they are hard to put to a test by only examining the social interaction between callers and operators, withoutrecourse to either theorised or mundane notions of children as participants in society’s business generally, and more specifically, thepresumably asymmetrical power relations between (adult) emergency operators and child callers. Adopting an indifferent stance to suchcommonsensically appealing explanations, we turn instead to search for local explanations—for something that we can readily observe andaccount for in the data.

One observation which might prove relevant is that in more than half of the children’s calls (58% or 23 calls), the child-caller isaccompanied by a third party, whose presence is – for a variety of reasons – hearable to us.10 As the caller can often be heard to orient tothe co-present third party, either through direct address, or by referring to the third party in the talk with the operator, we wanted toexamine if the presence of a third party has any effect on the opening interaction. In Table 2, we have broken down the opening actionsof child callers according to the presence of a third party.11

Three observations are immediately possible. Firstly, children produce three times as many requests for assistance where there is a co-presentthird party. Proportionally speaking, the relative occurrence of requests is doubled in this setting. Secondly, the proportion of descriptions ofemergencies is nearly doubled, when there is no third party at the caller’s end. Thirdly, the relative occurrence of other types of openings is thesame across the two settings. Although the relatively small occurrence of requests in the solitary setting makes a w2 analysis unfeasible, simplermeasures may be applied to identify tendencies. A Yule’s Q analysis of the request- and description openings across the two settings in Table 2returned an association of Q¼ .633. Thus, the presence of a third party seems to have an effect on whether the caller starts out by requestingassistance or describing the trouble for which s/he is calling.

The third parties accompanying the children callers in our corpus are either peers or adult relatives, who may either be parties to theincident or just co-present at the scene. To examine further the effect of the third party on the callers’ opening actions, we have broken downthe children’s calls according to the categories ‘‘peer’’ and ‘‘adult relative’’.12 The distribution of the opening actions is presented in Table 3.

As we can see, while requests for help are fairly uncommon in the solitary-caller and peer-present settings, their proportion is nearlytripled in the present-adult-relative setting. Conversely, description openings are fairly uncommon when there is a co-present adultrelative, while their relative occurrence is more than doubled in the solitary-caller and peer-present settings. Finally, the other type ofopening actions are relatively evenly distributed across the three settings.

In other words, the distribution of caller’s actions in the present-peer category virtually mirrors the actions of the caller when no thirdparty is present at the scene. Therefore, as a final step of the quantitative analysis, we have merged the two categories to increasestatistical power. The results are shown in Table 4 and the relative distributions in Fig. 2.

As we can see, the single most common opening action of child callers who are not accompanied by an adult, is a description of theincident that has lead them to call the emergency services (46% of the calls in this setting). As a matter of contrast, in the presence of anadult relative, child callers are much more prone to request a specific form of assistance. This accounts for half of the calls in the present-adult-relative setting. As the proportion of other types of opening actions is fairly stable across the two settings, we are now focusing on the

9 This answer might seem plausible, but only if we buy into an a-priori deficit view of the child. (For a critical discussion of this view, see Cromdal, 2006, 2009; Jenks,

1997; Mackay, 1975; Speier, 1976).10 Generally, a range of interactional exchanges may take place between callers and people in the background. Sometimes, the child-caller will directly consult the

adult about information which the operator has asked for. Occasionally, the adult in the background will engage with the child’s way of managing the call, either by

prompting the child to carry out some action, commenting on the child’s actions, or talk loudly so that the operator may register the information. Among other things, this

should have implications for the rather common notion of emergency calls as inherently dyadic exchanges.11 To clarify, by ‘‘third party’’ we are referring to a third person (or occasionally a collection of persons) on the caller’s end of the line, the presence of whom is an

oriented feature of the talk between the call an operator, or, alternatively, to a person in the background who is hearably addressing either one of the two parties.12 This categorisation was neccessarily based on vocal cues.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

No adult relative present n=24 Adult relative present n=16

%Requests

Descriptions

Other

Fig. 2. Relative distribution of children’s call openings as a function of adult relative’s presence.

Table 4Child callers’ opening actions as a function of adult relative’s presence.

No adult relative 3rd party Adult relative 3rd party

Requests 4 (17) 8 (50)

Descriptions 11(46) 3 (19)

Other 9 (37) 5 (31)

Total 24 (100%) 16 (100%)


relation between a co-present adult relative and the two most common opening actions, descriptions and requests. Yule’s Q returned afairly strong association of Q¼ .76.

Recalling the highly asymmetrical distribution of different opening actions across different categories of callers (cf. Table 1), we havenow examined some possible sources of variation in the opening sequences of children’s calls. The one feature characteristic of the callswhich start with a request for assistance, is that the child is accompanied by an adult relative. In calls where there is no adult relative at thecaller’s end, children are much more prone to produce descriptions of emergencies.

The problem we are now facing is how to account for these findings; what is it about the presence of the adult relative, that makes thechild caller start out by asking for help, rather than answering the operator’s question? It seems reasonable to suspect that the key to thisproblem is in the interaction between the child and the adult just prior to the call. Because we have no access to the talk that takes placebefore the operator has answered the summons, our explanation must be partly speculative. However, in some of the calls in our corpus,the parties will explicitly talk about the interaction that took place at the caller’s end just before the call was made. In the extract below,the operator asks whether the caller has been prompted by her father to make the call:

EXAMPLE 1. (b29)

This extract is taken from a call in which an young girl is calling about her mother who is suffering from an acute psychiatriccondition. As the exchange illustrates, there are circumstances in which an adult may be unable to talk over the phone, and has toinstruct a child to call for emergency assistance. We wish to propose that, as part of the instruction, the child may have also beenprompted to ask for a specific type of assistance (e.g., an ambulance). If this is the case, then the child who uses the first turn at talk torequest, say, an ambulance, is acting in alignment with a prior instruction.

As a way of accounting for the above findings, we are therefore suggesting that in calls where there is an adult relative (hearably) presentat the scene of the incident, the child caller may have been specifically instructed to immediately request a certain form of emergencyassistance. Clearly, such a scenario radically alters the footing (Goffman, 1981) of the opening exchange between the caller and operator,where the caller’s first turn should not be seen as oriented to the operator’s opening phrase, but to the interaction that preceded it.13

13 We should further add that immediate proximity of the adult relative to the child caller allows the former to monitor the way through which the latter carries out

the instruction.


As mentioned, our data do not allow us to prove that whenever a child calling in the presence of an adult starts out with a request for help,s/he must be acting on an explicit instruction from the adult. We are able to show this to be the case only when such issues crop up in thecourse of the call. We are, however, offering this as a plausible scenario that might account for our findings. Two further observations seem tofavour this explanation. Firstly, child callers never insist on having the operator grant the service, by repeating the request. As our analysis ofthe opening interaction demonstrates, having made the request at the outset, child callers proceed to attend to the operators’ subsequentqueries. This would support the idea that the child caller is initially orienting to the co-present adult, but once the instruction has beenexecuted, s/he is more attentive to the operator’s actions. Secondly, the presence of an adult relative seems only relevant for whether the childwill begin by presenting the emergency or by requesting a specific type of assistance; it does not seem to affect the other types of openingswhich we find in the children’s calls (cf. Fig. 2). Since the category labelled ‘‘other openings’’ mostly comprises interactions in which theparties deal with problems of identification/recognition of the service, issues of hearability or other type of interactional business that isorganisationally prior to requesting help or reporting on emergency incidents, we would not expect to find these type of openings affected bythe presence of an adult relative. Rather, along the lines of our reasoning, the presence of an adult relative only has an effect on the proportionof callers’ requests vs. descriptions.

To conclude this part of the analysis, we have identified, in our corpus of calls, a distributional pattern of opening actions acrossdifferent categories of callers. We have also attempted to account for this distribution in terms of situational contingencies, to the extentthat our data allow us to do so. However, we find that aggregated measures do not sufficiently allow us to learn about the local concernsand orientations of the parties, and how these goals and orientations are displayed, inferred and acted upon by the parties as relevant forthe institutional business of the calls. In order to examine the ‘‘just whatness’’ or ‘‘haecceity’’ (cf. Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel and Wieder,1992) of the participants’ actions, we now turn to examine the interactional organisation of the opening exchanges by fleshing out thediscursive methods through which the parties produce mutually recognisable courses of action.

5. Opening interaction in children’s emergency calls

In this section, we present an extensive analysis of the interactional and institutional bases of the opening exchanges in children’semergency calls. In so doing, we follow the three categories of call openings introduced in the quantitative analysis above. Thus, this partof the analysis elaborates the sense of the three types of call openings ‘‘requests for assistance’’, ‘‘descriptions of trouble’’ and, to someextent ‘‘other openings’’, by examining how these were produced by the participants mutually engaging in ‘‘doing emergency calls’’.

5.1. Requests for assistance

The following extracts14 display some typical organisational features of call openings in which children use their first turn to requestassistance:

EXAMPLE 2. (b11)

14 All personal and other potentially sensitive information (including for instance addresses, telephone numbers and geographical names) has been altered in the

transcripts. Furthermore, in line with a security agreement between the researchers and SOS Alarm, all transcription work has been carried out on site, to ensure that no

recordings left the centre. Transcriptions follow conversation analytic standards (e.g., Jefferson, 2004), slightly adapted to allow notation of nonvocal activities such as

keyboard sounds, or a wide scope of background noise including shouting, loud music or sirens (see Appendix A, for transcript key).


EXAMPLE 3. (b17)

In both extracts, the child is calling to request medical assistance on behalf of a co-present parent. In Example 2, the caller startsout with a greeting, then proceeds to present his first name. Following a short pause, he asks for an ambulance to a specific destination(lines 3–4). The hitches (pause and audible inbreath) and perturbations (stretched vocal sounds; cf. Schegloff, 2000, 2007) make the firstpart of the caller’s turn hearable as procedurally troublesome, possibly displaying the boy’s uncertainty as how to present his business.


Example 3 shows even more clearly the caller’s procedural trouble: after a short pause, the caller produces a single greeting, marked by astrong rising intonation (line 5). In contrast to Example 2, this move solicits a greeting from the operator in line 6. Such greetingsequences are somewhat unusual in our corpus, as well as in other studies of emergency call openings. As Whalen and Zimmerman(1987) point out, ‘‘It is the display of the call’s purpose in turn two, not a greeting exchange, that ratifies the state of talk between theparties’’ (p. 177). However, in the present example it is precisely the ‘‘state of talk’’ that is at stake for the parties. This is evident in thetalk following the greeting sequence, where the caller’s uncertainty as how to proceed is lexicalised. He begins the turn with a word-search token, ‘‘.hh 4whatchmao ca:klli:::kt (.)’’ (line 9), before moving on to request an ambulance for his mother. Just like in Example2 then, the caller’s turn entails a series of hitches and perturbations, which demonstrate the caller’s trouble in presenting his reason forthe call.

In responding to the two callers’ requests for medical assistance, the operators further pursue a formulation of the trouble. Clearly, acaller’s claims for urgent need of an ambulance, does not provide sufficient grounds for a dispatch. Rather, as Cromdal et al., (2008) haveshown, during the earliest phases of the calls, emergency operators are overwhelmingly oriented towards soliciting an institutionallyrelevant, or ‘‘workable’’, report of the incident. Accordingly, in the extracts above, the operators’ second questions target the nature of theincident for which the caller is requesting urgent medical assistance. In this sense, they can be said to pursue the same type ofinformation that was wanted already in the opening turn. However, although the operators’ second questions deal with missinginformation, they are tailored in a way that does not attribute culpability to the caller for not supplying the requested information.Rather, both operators’ second queries are accountably sensitive to the caller’s request. Hence, in asking about ‘‘what has happened therethen?’’ (Example 2, line 6), after the caller has specified an address to which he wants the ambulance to be sent, the operator displays tothe caller that she has received the location of the incident. Similarly, in Example 3, the operator’s query about the nature of the mother’sailment (line 13), shows that the operator has registered the caller’s relation to the potential patient. In tying on to fragments ofinformation offered in the callers’ first turns, the operators move in a stepwise fashion towards a workable formulation of the caller’strouble.

This procedure is distinct from calls in which the operator shows difficulties in perceiving or otherwise making sense of the caller’sfirst turn, as in the two extracts below:

EXAMPLE 4. (b13)


EXAMPLE 5. (b17)

In Example 4, the operator queries the key element (‘‘police?’’, line 7) of the caller’s request to be put through to the police. Althoughthis move clearly recycles a part of the caller’s utterance, it is not unequivocally hearable as an inquiry about the potential emergency, asin Examples 2 and 3. Rather, it is treated by the caller as a comprehension check, who simply confirms the operator’s displayed hearing inline 9. Similarly, Example 5 shows a repair sequence initiated by the operator’s direct request for repetition in line 10, in which the calleraccomplishes the repair by restating an address, then adding a personal identification (lines 12–13). In both cases, the repair is carriedout as an insertion sequence (Schegloff, 1972, 2007) and we can see the operator resuming the inquiry into what has ocurred, after therepair sequence has been brought to a closure (Example 4, line 10; Example 5, line 16).

Although all four extracts show how operators deal with missing information, there is an important procedural difference between operators’second actions in the two initial examples and those seen in Examples 4 and 5. In Examples 2 and 3 above, these actions are not designed toinitiate repair, but to solicit institutionally relevant and actionable information. Hence, the interaction is geared towards progression (cf. Stiversand Robinson, 2006). In contrast, in Examples 4 and 5 the operators’ questions project repair as the relevant next activity.

There seems to be a mismatch of the parties’ local interests in Examples 2 and 3: whereas the operators’ first concern is withestablishing whether or not the nature of the callers’ business is relevant for an emergency response, the callers unsurprisingly seem to takethe need for help – and its relevance for emergency dispatch – for granted. Their foremost concern is with soliciting an immediate dispatchof a paramedic unit. The operators’ second questions are tailored to deal precisely with this nonalignment of the parties’ local concerns.

Indeed, in responding to the operators’ second questions, the callers in Examples 2 and 3 work to specify the nature of the trouble. InExample 2, the caller begins to describe what is wrong with his mother (‘‘ko:h min mamma har’’/‘‘ke:h my mum’s got’’, line 10), thencuts off and turns to the mother asking about her medical condition (‘‘4va ha:ruo?’’/‘‘4whatja go:to?’’). Again, we see displays ofprocedural trouble in the caller’s turn, and his uncertainty as how to formulate the mother’s medical condition is dealt with by engagingthe mother as an active party in the production of the emergency report. In Example 3, the caller responds to the operator’s secondquestion (‘‘4va e de me mammao da:::?’’/‘‘4what’s wrong with mumo then:::?’’, line 13) by offering a symptom (‘‘a:: hon harjatteon:th.’’/‘‘e:: she’s in bad pai:n.’’, line 15). This turn is slightly delayed and prefaced with a hesitation token displaying, again, thecaller’s uncertainty. He then moves on to verbalise his trouble in describing the mother’s condition in detail, declaring that he has nofurther knowledge of the precise location of the mother’s pain. The operator continues the diagnostic interview by following up on thecaller’s disclaimed knowledge, prompting him to ask the mother about her ailment in line 20 (‘‘va sajer hon dak’’/‘‘so what’dz she sayk’’).


These examples show the interactional relevance and procedural consequentiality (Schegloff, 1979a) of the co-presence of an adult on howthe need for help is initially characterised. If the co-present adult-patient’s condition allows her/him to be included as an active party in theongoing production of the emergency report, it seems reasonable to assume that some interaction would have taken place between the adult-patient and the child-caller immediately prior to the call. More specifically, we wish to entertain the possibility that the child has beeninstructed, prior on making the call, to request a specific type of assistance from the emergency operator. In cases like these, the operator’sopening request for an incident description may simply be at odds with the instruction that the child-caller has received from the adult.Hence, in requesting a specific type of service at the first sequential slot available to the caller, the child can be seen to perform the actions thatwere asked of him/her prior to the call. In addition, and crucially, the child would be carrying out the task under the potential inspection of thevery same adult who not only prompted her/him to make the call, but also instructed her/him what to tell the operator.

Recalling our quantitative presentation of the call openings across our entire corpus of calls, we noted that child callers are generally moreprone to produce initial requests when there is an adult relative present at the scene. In this section, we have examined the openingsequences of a subset of calls beginning with a request for assistance, focusing on the divergent local concerns of callers and operators and onthe interactional work through which operators strive to establish the nature of the incident and its relevance to the emergency services. In sodoing, we have discussed the role of the co-present adult, on behalf of whom the child is making the call, focusing on the interactionalconsequentiality of the adult-patient’s proximity to the child-caller on the opening sequences of the calls, as well as on the subsequentinteraction. In the next section, we examine three call openings in which the callers start out by describing the incident leading up to the call.

5.2. Descriptions of emergencies

As mentioned in the introduction, the operators’ opening phrase ‘‘SOS one-one-two, what has occurred’’ is designed to solicit a report of thepresumed emergency in the caller’s very first turn at talk. Clearly, this does not always happen, and we have already seen that child callers willfrequently use this turn space to make a request for assistance. Accordingly, in the previous section we showed how operators persist in tryingto find out the nature of the emergency by paraphrasing the original query in ways that will yield the missing information, rather than promptthe caller to repeat or rephrase the request. Thus, the sequential implicature of the opening line, along with certain organisational concerns,become observable through the operators’ orientation towards the callers reporting an emergency as the projected next action.

In the following section, we move on to consider how children design their reports of emergency situations and how such reports arereceived and managed through subsequent interaction. We begin with a fairly straightforward example in which a 10-year old girl callsabout a horse riding accident:

EXAMPLE 6. (b10)

In contrast to the opening exchanges in the previous section, this caller starts out by acknowledging the identification offered in theoperator’s response to the summons, then produces a fast-paced report of a horse riding accident15 (lines 4–5). The operator immediatelystarts typing, presumably feeding the information into the dispatch support system. This testifies to the conditional relevance (Schegloff,1968) of the caller’s report to the operator’s opening line: rather than further pursuing, as in our earlier extracts, a formulationaddressing the matter of ‘‘what has occurred’’, the operator is accountably receiving the information. Although it is not possible to tellwhether the caller is sensitive to the operator’s keyboard work, it is interesting to note that the extension of her report (specifying themedical condition of the girl having fallen off the horse, line 8) is delivered only after the typing sounds have ceased (cf. Mondada, 2008;

15 Readers may note that there is some minor perturbation prior to the caller’s report, resembling a word-search token. Once she begins the report, however, there is

no evidence of hesitation or other procedural trouble in formulating the reason for calling the emergency services.


Zimmerman, 1992b). The operator then acknowledges the report and initiates an interrogation about the location of the caller andpatient. This brings the opening sequence to a close, indicating that the emergency status of the caller’s business has been successfullyestablished for all current intents and purposes.

5.2.1. Minimal formulations of emergencies

In Example 6, we showed how the caller’s responsiveness to the question in the operator’s opening phrase allowed the operator toimmediately establish the relevance and actionability of the incident. However, merely addressing the issue of ‘‘what has occurred’’ doesnot always suffice for the operator to decide whether or not the incident requires emergency assistance. Consider the next extract, inwhich a young boy calls about an ongoing domestic fight:

EXAMPLE 7. (b14)

The caller starts out in line 4 with a hesitant greeting, then following a self-repair initiation, tells the operator that there is a fight going on.The caller’s procedural trouble here seem to deal both with the issue as how to begin the call, as evidenced in particular bythe withdrawal of the greeting ‘‘hi? (.) kor nm:.’’, as well as with the matter of how to phrase his business, as displayed through theword-search preceding his naming of the circumstances that have lead him to call for help ‘‘there’s::: (.) a mfi:ght hh.’’. While the latteris largely a matter of descriptive precision through lexical choice (as we further learn in line 7, where the caller narrows down his formulationinto a subclass of fights, a ‘‘family row’’), the former trouble seems to relate, locally, to the sequential ordering of the talk, and more generally,to the specific institutional nature of emergency assistance calls. More specifically, the slight delay of the caller’s first turn (line 3), the hesitantgreeting and its retraction show the caller’s attempt to deal with the ambiguity resulting on the one hand from the reduced-specialised formatof the operator’s opening turn (Wakin and Zimmerman, 1999) which makes pleasantries obsolete and immediately targets the institutionalrelevance of the caller’s business, and on the other, from the Swedish norm for telephone communication which requires that at least thecaller starts off with a greeting (cf. Lindstrom, 1996, for a comparative analysis of telephone call openings in Holland, Sweden and the US).

After his initial turn, the caller produces a second self-repair in line 7, telling the operator that there is a family row going on at his end:‘‘4or ao h. we’ve got a family mrow. hh.’’. The initial description ‘‘row’’ is transformed into the more specific ‘‘family row’’ and the event isnow accountably located to the caller’s own domestic sphere. Thus, having rendered his previous two actions – the greeting and the initialcharacterisation of the trouble – as problematic, this formulation now brings the caller’s report to a point of hearable completion.

The operator’s response in line 9 displays her trouble in hearing the caller’s report and she produces what Koshik (2002) has termed a‘‘designedly incomplete utterance’’ to solicit a partial repetition of the caller’s turn. The operator’s request for clarification begins with afast-paced question ’’4whatja just msay:o ’’ then tags on the first part of the caller’s report in line 4 to begin the answer, which leaves an


unfinished slot for the caller to complete. Using reported speech in this way, allows the operator to solicit a repetition of the problematic(non/misheard) fragment only, rather than a full repetition of the caller’s turn, showing in this way her orientation towards such mattersas progression, brevity, precision and other contingencies of emergency call-taking work. Accordingly, the caller repeats the accountablynon-heard item ‘‘ofamilyro:wh.4 ’’ (line 11), using slow-pacing and other prosodic resources to clarify his report.

Again, the operator recycles the talk of the caller, repeating the clarified item using identical prosody, save for the final syllable whichis pronounced with questioning intonation. Questioning reproduction of just previous turns or turn fragments typically locate some formof trouble in the previous speaker’s talk and tend to solicit such actions as elaborations, explanations and accounts or simpleconfirmations (cf. Osvaldsson et al., 2013, for an analysis of emergency operators’ use of this type of confirmation requests in certainsequential environments). Contrary to the operator’s intended meaning, the caller treats line 12 as a request for confirmation, and we cansee how the operator initiates a new line of questioning, dedicated to the unpacking of the formulation offered by the caller. Clearly,‘‘family row’’ is a gloss for a wide collection of activities, which may vary in their relevance for the emergency services, as well as interms of urgency of any potential response action that the operator may chose to initiate. Borrowing from Ryle (1968), the presentcaller’s minimal formulation of the kind of trouble he is witnessing is just too ‘‘thin’’ a description to allow the operator to decide upon acourse of response action (see Cromdal et al., 2008, for a discussion of ‘‘thin’’, ‘‘thick’’ and ‘‘thick-enough’’ descriptions in emergencycalls). In the present instance, the operator chooses a line of inquiry to do with possible occurrence of interpersonal violence, rather than,say, shouting or hitting the furniture. That is to say, she is trying to make a very specific sense of the caller’s gloss, pursuing aninstitutionally relevant and ‘‘workable description’’ of the reported trouble (Cromdal et al., 2008 p. 930).

In our corpus, this type of minimalistic formulations are relatively infrequent, as initial reports of emergency situations normallyentail more information either about the nature of the trouble itself or its setting. It may well be that these minimalistic reports resultfrom local circumstances which impose interactional difficulties upon the caller. More specifically, in the context of a family drama, itmay be very hard to describe the ongoing events in so many words, while striving to keep the call out of earshot of the parties involved inthe ongoing trouble. While in some calls, the parties do attend to matters of secrecy, other calls, like the one shown in Excerpt 7, do notleave any clues in this respect. We now turn to consider a more prevailing class of initial reports of emergencies, in which the quantity ofinformation is much more abundant.

5.2.2. Extended reports and narratives

In contrast to the brief formulations of trouble discussed in the previous section, young callers occasionally use their first turn toproduce more extensive trouble reports. Such elaborate accounts typically report on emergencies in public space and often deal withevents in-progress. Accordingly, callers may display ambiguity as to what has actually happened or what may be about to happen.Consider Example 8 below, in which a young caller is witnessing the aftermath of a bicycle accident:

EXAMPLE 8. (b4)


Upon the operator’s opening line, delayed by nearly two seconds of typing,16 the caller acknowledges that he has come to the rightnumber (‘‘right ye’’), produces a greeting and self-presentation in line 6, then cuts off after a conjunctive particle. Resuming his turnshortly, the caller states his location ‘‘I’m at Lonndal’’ (a downtown neighbourhood), then produces a disjunctive particle and a prefacefor a telling (‘‘but’’þ ‘‘ its like’’, line 7). Note that the cut-off before the location description coupled with the ensuing disjunction mark theembedded location formulation as a parenthetical, highlighting by the same token the subsequent formulation of the trouble. Theincreased pace of the trouble report in lines 7–8 further casts these preliminaries as problematic; as accountable delays in the delivery ofan expected type of action.17

The caller’s report contains a short narrative about an elderly man having fallen off a bicycle and ‘‘messed his whole face up’’ (line 10).This narration provides an account of the events leading up to the call, thus supplying just the type of information solicited by theoperator’s question ‘‘what has ocurred?’’. But the narrative does not merely describe the bicycle accident of an elderly man, it also holdsclues to the caller’s local identity within the incident. For example, from the caller’s categorisation of the patient as ‘‘an old fella’’(resulting from a self-correction of an initial categorisation as ‘‘a guy’’) we learn that the two of them are not acquainted. Furthermore,the micropause preceding the characterisation of the incident and it’s hedged formulation ‘‘(.) like fallen off a bike’’ suggests that thecaller is offering a conclusion based on local, presumably visual, evidence, rather than a direct observation of the biking accident. Finally,the vernacular and distinctly imprecise symptom formulation, that the man had ‘‘messed his whole face up’’, suggests that the caller isplainly reporting what he is seeing, without engaging in further analysis of the possible injuries (as for instance opposed to the report inExample 6 in which the fallen rider had allegedly ‘‘lost a whole bunch of teeth’’).

The caller’s narrative then, suggests that he is neither acquainted with the patient, nor familiar with the details of the incident.Against the backdrop of this telling, the caller concludes his report by declaring lack of knowledge about how to proceed. As Emmisonand Danby (2007a) aptly observe, in service calls, such statements may serve as closures of the callers’ declarations of their reason for thecall. In addition, this explicit epistemic disclaimer works as an implicit request for help, comprising, at the same time, an account forcalling the emergency services.18

The caller is acting along the lines of what Turner (1969) and Eglin and Wideman (1979) have referred to as ‘‘the good citizen model’’,that is to say, as somebody who is acting on his own initiative, to meet the cultural expectation to aid a fellow human in need of acutemedical assistance. In contrast to the calls where the caller is evidently calling on behalf on an adult who is also a close relative (as inExamples 2 and 3), our present caller is taking a more consultative stance towards the operator. Clearly, there are different stakes (Edwards,2006) at hand in these two types of situations which becomes evident in the callers’ initial presentation of their business, which includestheir epistemic stance towards the need for emergency assistance.19 Hence, the narrative format of the initial report in Example 8, beingmore information dense and inference rich than the requests for assistance in Examples 2 and 3 and the minimalistic formulation of thetrouble in Example 7, allows the caller to more openly consult the operator about the proper course of action.20

5.3. Pre-business exchanges

We have so far discussed two major types of opening exchanges; those containing callers’ requests for some specific type ofemergency assistance and those comprising callers’ descriptions of the incidents for which they are seeking help. While bothdescriptions as well as requests entail the callers’ commonsense recognition of – and display their orientation to – the business ofthe emergency dispatch centre, the openings in the present section (classified as ‘‘other’’ in Table 1) significantly deviate from the above.

The crucial difference is that whereas requests for help and descriptions of trouble necessarily hinge on a successful identification ofthe institution,21 the talk following upon the operators’ opening in the extracts below deals with matters that seem organisationallyprior to such topics. For this reason, we refer to such talk as pre-business exchanges. Consider the interaction below:

16 As we point out elswhere (Cromdal, et al., 2008), the operator’s typing may not just delay the answer to the summons; it also provides a hearable and relevant

account for the absence of an answer. The silence on the caller’s part may show his orientation to the operator’s unavailability, and/or an expectation on the operator to

answer the summons.17 In a similar manner, the increased speed of the caller’s presentation in line 6 possibly displays his orientation to the altogether delayed production of his turn, as

well as the hitches and perturbations in the first part of line 6.18 In their analysis, Emmison and Danby (2007a) draw on data from a collection of young persons’ calls to the KHL as well as a corpus of calls to a software helpline (cf.

Baker et al., 2005). Incidentally, they conclude that epistemic statements like ‘I don’t know what to do’ are ‘‘almost inconceivable’’ in the context of calls for emergency

assistance. Their position is grounded in the undisputably sensible argument that the very fact that a call has been placed to the emergency services testifies to at least

some knowledge on the caller’s part concerning the proper course of action: ‘‘Rather than not knowing what to do, callers have already manifestly demonstrated they have

taken appropriate action’’ (p. 80). Somewhat similarly, Wakin and Zimmerman (1999) note that ‘‘the placing of the call functions as the request initiation’’ (p. 427,

emphasis in original). The force of this argument nonwithstanding, our corpus holds several calls in which callers not only do produce such knowledge disclaimers, but in

which these disclaimers seem to accomplish some fine-tuned interactional business. Specifically, callers’ statements about ‘‘not knowing what to do’’ seem to display their

uncertainty regarding whether or not they ought to be making the call in the first place—a potentially tricky decision as the stakes may range anywhere between failing to

initiate a possibly life-saving chain of activities and, at the other end of the spectrum, wasting the operator’s time by reporting on incidents which do not call for

emergency response (hence potentially preventing essential life-saving activities which may be urgently required elsewhere). As we will note in the current example, the

knowledge disclaimer allows the caller to take on an accountably consultative stance towards the operator, and it takes a prolonged negotiation before the very first

organisational problem—whether or not a paramedic response is needed—is resolved (see Cromdal et al., 2008, for an extended analysis of the interaction unfolding in

this call).19 Issues of stake as well as other features of this call have been discussed in more depth elsewhere (Cromdal et al., 2008). For the purposes of this paper, we need only

concern us with the ways in which callers manage their own concerns as well as the local sequential contingencies imposed upon them by the operator’s standardised

opening.20 In Cromdal et al. (2008) we show that, for a number of reasons, it takes nearly two minutes before the operator decides to send out an ambulance. Most of the

negotiations up to that point deal with the fundamental issue of whether the condition of the victim-of-the-accident-and-potential-patient nessecitates a paramedic

response. An important factor contributing to the relatively late response has to deal with the caller’s uncertainty about the details of the victim’s injuries and his partial

reluctance to get further involved in the incident.21 Note that actions such as request or description may either follow upon a completed successful identification—recognition sequence, typically after a turn-initial

recognition token (as in examples 6 and 8), or they may themselves form the relevant second pair-part of this sequence, as in examples 2, 4, 5, and 7). The point here is that

they trade on a successful identification of institution and the service it provides (see Watson, 1986, for a thorough analysis of institutional identifications of a telephone

service).


EXAMPLE 9. (b25)

In the present example, the operator’s response to the summons does not elicit any hearable action from the caller, and after anextended silence in line 4 we find the operator taking the next turn virtually shouting ‘‘nmHELLO:kn’’ into the headset microphone.Earlier in the analysis, we noted that a substantial amount of summons coming in through the emergency number turn out to be ‘‘pocketcalls’’, with no proper caller at the other end. The resonant shout in line 5 comprises one of the means through which operatorsfrequently check if they are dealing with an actual person calling in. The sequential implicature of this move, should there prove to be acaller, is that virtually any reply will count as a relevant action, and the present caller’s ‘‘mhello’’ in line 7 evidently satisfies thecondition.22

What we are dealing with here is a insertion sequence (Schegloff, 1972, 2007), prompted by the silence (and possibly by the initialcrackling noise on the line23) and designed to find out whether the exchange comprised of the summons and the operator’s response isan instance of human-to-human interaction. Clearly, when the existence of an actual caller becomes an issue after the summons, thenthis is dealt with before any further questions are asked about an (now evidently hypothetical) incident.

Having thus established that this is not a pocket call, the operator paraphrases the institutional identification emphasising theorganisational function of the number that the caller has reached: ‘‘emergency number oneone two:¿’’.24 The caller’s notably delayedquestion in line 11 testifies to his lack of recognition of the service, and in lines 13–14 the operator further unpacks the identification bylisting the most frequent emergency services. Note that the list is produced contrastively to the services of the emergency ward. Herethen, the operator acts upon the caller’s lack of practical knowledge of the service offered through the emergency number; knowledge,which quoting Watson ‘‘would equip [the caller] in designing [his] problem in terms which would at least putatively dovetail with

22 The local relevance of the caller’s utterance is acknowledged in the operator’s receipt ‘‘ye::k’’ in line 9, which also displays her orientation to the initial business of

finding out whether or not she is dealing with a pocket call.23 There is some evidence in our corpus that operators orient to technical trouble on the line by slightly delaying their answer to the summons, as in line 2 of the

present extract or lines in 1–2, Examples 3 and 4.24 Although it is possible to analyse this turn-design for its orientation to the caller’s accountability for making the call, the current caller is more concerned with

identifying the service he has reached.


organizational relevancies’’ (1986, p. 92).25 It is possible that the operator is hereby orienting to the hearably young age of the caller. Byshowcasing the most common emergency services, she opens up for several potentially relevant trajectories of action, including thecaller choosing one of the candidate options as part of a request for help, or retreating on the grounds of simply having called the wrongplace. With no action forthcoming in the next three seconds, the operator attempts to prompt the caller to specify his need for help.

In other words, there are two problems in this call that postpone the relevance of an incident report or a request for help: establishingwhether the contact is initiated by a human caller or merely a ‘‘pocket call’’, and managing the identification of the organisation and itsservices. Needless to say, these two problems have to be dealt with in that precise order.

Our final example shows the opening exchanges of a call in which the parties engage in a different kind of preliminary business:

EXAMPLE 10. (b12)

Here, the caller’s first action orients to neither the identification nor the query in the operator’s opening line. The ‘‘�hhallmma::h?� ’’in line 3 is produced in a quivery, or ‘‘wobbly’’ voice (see Hepburn, 2004, for a discussion of different features of crying talk) with heavyaspiration, a notably nasal tonal quality, and a heavy terminal prosodic marking (rising pitch, emphasis and vowel stretch), giving theunmistakable impression of a young person crying. The operator returns the ‘‘hello’’ with a turn-final receipt token ‘‘hallamja?’’(‘‘myeshello?’’, line 4) which suggests that rather than returning a greeting, she is confirming recipiency of the talk. For the caller, thisworks as a license to ‘‘go ahead’’ and after a brief moment of sniveling, he produces a greeting and introduces himself by full name (lines8–9). Due to the crying, and possibly to the fact that the name he produces is not an immediately recognisable one in a Swedish context,it is hard to make out the details of (the last) name, and in line 10, the operator initiates a repair sequence by indicatingnoncomprehension of the entire prior turn, rather than just the fragment following after the announcement of the caller’s name. Hisvoice continuously trembling, the caller repeats his previous turn, save for the initial greeting (line 11).

Gardner (2007) shows how speakers may use the receipt token ‘‘right’’ to ‘‘acknowledge a particularly salient connection’’ betweenthe immediately prior turn and some more distantly previous talk. In line 12, the operator’s receipt token ‘‘ja’’ (which in the currentsequential environment corresponds to the English ‘‘right’’) accomplishes a similar type of work: it acknowledges the caller’s earliergreeting (line 8) by linking it with the returned greeting which follows directly in the operator’s turn in line 12. Hence, the operator’s

25 A comment on translation: because in English both the emergency ward and the emergency dispatch centre entail the initial term ‘‘emergency’’, readers may object

to this interpretation, pointing out that the caller may simply have conflated the two identifications. In Swedish, however, these two institutions come under linguistically

distinct labels akuten (‘‘emergency ward’’) and nodnumret (‘‘emergency number’’) which makes conflation of the terms unlikely.


turn concludes the greeting sequence26 as well as the repair sequence inserted therein. For our current interests, we should note that italso assigns to the caller the interactional space and permission to freely design the continuation of his business—much like in line 4.

In fact, in light of the previous examples (cf. Excerpts 2, 4, and 5) in which operators would orient to the absence of an incident reportby pursuing a response explicitly addressing ‘‘what had ocurred’’, the actions of the operator in the current extract seem strikinglyopen-ended. Without going into detail, the operator’s moves display her concern with the caller’s emotional state. The boy is hearablyvery upset, choking and sniveling between turns and the talk he produces shows evidence of somewhat suppressed crying. Hepburn’s(2004) account of crying in calls to a NSPCC telephone helpline, shows how call-takers manage outbursts of crying by explicitly offeringtime-outs, during which the caller may compose him/herself, and by producing emphatic receipts of the caller’s displayed emotionalstate. In the context of emergency calls, where time may matter in a very direct sense – either in the call being handled or in another, yetunanswered, call waiting in line – operators normally do not encourage callers to ‘‘take their time’’. Yet, in our present example, we wishto suggest that by abstaining to prompt the caller to describe his (presumed) emergency, or attempt to otherwise actively pursue areport of his current situation, the operator is doing something similar to allowing the caller to take his time with presenting hisbusiness. Furthermore, the operator’s turns in lines 4, 10 and 12 are produced in a relatively soft tone of voice, making her actionshearable as ‘‘friendly’’. Moreover, in line 12 the operator returns the caller’s greeting, which we find in less than 5% of the calls in ourcorpus. While we would hesitate from characterising these actions as ‘‘emphatic receipts’’ in the lexicalised sense discussed by Hepburn(2004), the prosodic design of the operator’s receipt of the talk, along with the greeting return and her withheld pursuit of an account of‘‘what has ocurred’’, suggests that she is attuning to the young boy’s emotional state.

This rather atypical opening exchange should be thought of in terms of emotional management. More specifically, we argue thatbuilding up and sustaining the caller’s ‘‘emotional communicability’’ is a central concern for the emergency operators throughout thecourse of any call. When the caller’s emotional state becomes a concern at the very outset of the call, it comprises an instance of pre-business talk. That is to say, just like the activities of identifying of ‘‘pocket calls’’, managing troubles of hearability or problems withidentification-recognition of the services provided, the caller’s emotional communicability needs to be established before it becomespossible to solicit a report of an incident and to assess the need for an emergency response.

6. Conclusions and discussion

A foundational feature of emergency assistance agencies is that the services offered are meant to be available to all members ofsociety: any person is eligible to request emergency assistance regardless of individual characteristics such as age or gender, or of anysocioeconomic, cultural, religious or other biographical features. In effect, emergency operators meet a broad spectrum of callers whofind themselves in a variety of more or less severe circumstances, which may include physical injury as well as emotional distress. Forthese and other reasons, the principal concern of emergency operators – to secure relevant and sufficiently accurate information to allowfor appropriate action response – involves monitoring and managing potential communicative challenges (Osvaldsson et al., 2013).

In this article, we have examined a corpus of calls placed by the youngest members of society. More specifically, we have shown howchildren and emergency operators jointly work their way through the opening sequences of emergency calls. To gain some perspective,we have also compared the children’s responses to the operators’ standard opening phrase with the responses of other groups of callers.

Previous work on calls to emergency centres has demonstrated how openings are organised to render the caller’s reason for the callthrough specialisation and reduction of the ‘‘core opening sequence’’ observed in mundane telephone calls (Schegloff, 1986a, b). In thetypical case, the reason for calling would be supplied as part of caller’s first action and include some specification of the incident – in theshape of report, description or narrative – or, alternatively, through a simple request for help (Whalen and Zimmerman, 1987; Wakinand Zimmerman, 1999). As we have seen, the standard opening phrase in our corpus, ‘‘sos one one two, what has occurred’’, is tailored tofurther constrain callers’ entry into the encounter, projecting specification of the emergency, rather than request for help, as the relevanttype of action (cf. Examples 2–5). This clearly indicates an institutional concern regarding interactional procedure, where the primaryinterest of the operator is to establish the status and nature of the emergency, before deciding how (if at all) to proceed with theinterrogation.

The quantitative part of the analysis showed systematic differences across our corpus regarding the callers’ uptake of thestandardised opening, indicating that adult as well as teenage callers seemed overwhelmingly responsive to the operators’ initialquery. In contrast, the children in our corpus were less prone to instantly specify the nature of the emergency, and would frequently startout by requesting a specific type of assistance. In attempting to account for this variation, we turned to search for local explanations,seeking to understand the children’s behaviour in terms of the demands and expectations they seemed to be facing when calling for help.One seemingly relevant contingency had to do with whether the child was making the call in the immediate presence of an adultrelative. Having controlled for the possible effect of the adult relative on the interaction, we found that the statistical distribution ofchildren’s responses to the operators’ standard opening resembles those of the other groups of callers.

This led us to recognise the possibility that occasionally children who call for emergency assistance may already be primed by adultinstructions concerning how to behave when talking to the operator. Unsurprisingly, this proved particularly the case for children whowere calling on behalf of a co-present adult relative. Such a conclusion fits well not just with the observed distribution of children’sdescriptions vs. request actions across the two contexts (adult relative vs. no adult relative), but also with the relatively stable proportionof other types of initial business which we find in the corpus (cf. Fig. 2). As shown through the qualitative analysis, these ‘‘otheropenings’’ deal with matters which are necessarily prior to such activities as describing incidents or requesting help and are thereforenot likely to be susceptible to the influence of adult instructions concerning how to solicit help.

Crucial to our understanding of these findings is the dual analytic orientation of this study. Our attempts to account for theasymmetric distribution of the different types of openings are largely speculative, for our search for the local contingencies which theparties face and manage during the early phases of the call leads us to discuss events that would take place before the call—taking us as

26 This is the reason for our earlier argument that the exchange of ’’hello’s’’ in lines 3–4 does not comprise a greeting sequence.

Table A1Transcription notations.

(2.65) Numbers in single parentheses represent pauses in seconds

(.) Micropause (shorter than.3 s)

(( )) Analyst’s comments

[ Indicates start of simultaneous talk

] Indicates end of simultaneous talk

¼ Latched utterances

(x) Inaudible word

(xxx) Inaudible words

(drop dead) Best guess

- Highlights a particular feature discussed in the text

: Prolongation of preceding sound

drop dead Sounds marked by emphatic stress are underlined

HELLO Markedly increased amplitude

1 1 Markedly lower amplitude

nn Hoarse voice

� � Wobbly voice

£ £ Smiling voice

mk Rising/falling intonation in succeeding Syllable(s)

< Questioning intonation

¿ Moderately rising terminal intonation

, ‘‘Continuing’’ intonation

. Final intonation

- Abrupt halt

4 o Embeds talk that is faster than surrounding speech

o 4 Embeds talk that is slower than surrounding speech

.hh Inbreath

hh. Outbreath

hi; ha; he; ho; hh Varieties of laughter

—01.30— Call progression in minutes and seconds

{��} Keyboard sound, timed with simultaneous talk

what saying you Word-by-word translation is provided for lines Where the word order of the Swedish original Differs from the English translation


it were beyond the realm of our corpus. However, our analysis of the joint interactional work through which callers and operators arriveat an initial characterisation of the emergency shows how the parties may orient to, and occasionally exploit, the presence of an adultrelative at the child’s end of the line. More important still is the observation that whatever interaction took place at the caller’s end priorto the call may at any point become a relevant matter for the current interaction between caller and operator. Hence, the recentinteractional history between the child caller and the adult relative may prove relevant in, for instance, accounting for the call,warranting or questioning its legitimacy, authenticity or relevance, and a scope of other interactional projects that may be part of thecall’s business. In this respect, our account for the findings obtained through statistical analysis of call openings across caller age groupsis not without warrant—it is anchored in observations and findings obtained through the qualitative analysis.

The findings discussed in this paper, we believe, have some interesting implications with respect to emergency communications aswell as to prevailing commonsense notions of children. The analyses of the opening interactions point to the routine character of theoperators’ work, and we have shown how their receipts of callers’ requests for assistance discloses an orientation towards relevance andaccuracy of the information, but also towards the progression of the interrogation.27 At the same time, the work of receiving emergencyreports requires a great deal of sensitivity towards the ‘‘situation’’ or circumstances at hand, not only due to the specificity of each actualincident, but also because for the callers, experiencing and reporting on these events constitutes the very opposite of daily routine. As wehave seen, the hedges, hesitations and other forms of perturbations in the callers’ formulations of their reason for calling testify to theiruncertainty as how to present their business so as to successfully solicit a timely response.

It may seem tempting to relate this uncertainty to the callers’ young age. After all, most people will recognise that as far as languageand communicative skills are concerned, children have yet a lot to learn. For several reasons, we have tried to avoid suchdevelopmentally oriented explanations in our analysis.

It has long been recognised within ethnomethodology that research on children takes a deficit-oriented approach to the agency andcompetence of their subjects, a practice firmly anchored in the unreflected tendency to compare children’s behaviour with that of anidealised adult (Freebody, 1995; Payne and Ridge, 1985; Mackay, 1975; Speier, 1976; see also Cromdal, 2009, for discussion). One of themany objections that may be raised against such analytic imposition is that a stale focus on the developmental incapacities of youngpersons risks blinding us to what children, as social beings, do accomplish in actual settings by using whatever mental, communicativeand social resources they find at hand. The specific institutional nature of our data offers a glimpse at a different picture, as emergencyoperators simply could not afford to underestimate children’s agency, interactional skills and reliability as informants. Although we maysafely assume that in most cases children will be identified as such, on the very first sample of their voice, we find that for the purpose ofeach and every call, their default identity is that of informant, rather than child. When lives are potentially at stake, questioning theinformants’ ability to contribute what they know about an emergency incident on the basis of their young age would be a bad placeto start.

As we have already indicated, people who call for emergency assistance display a wide scope of states and dispositions – includingyoung (or very old) age, intoxication, medical injury, limited language skills or emotional distress – each of which may have a bearing on

27 Thus, the extended pursuit of ‘‘the reason for the call’’ simultaneously constitutes a move into the ‘‘interrogative series’’ (cf. Zimmerman, 1992b), suggesting that

although systematically recurring tasks and activities may be formally identified in emergency calls, in actual practice they are often merged or otherwise co-ordinated,

which further testifies to the participants’ overall occupation with matters of efficacy and progression.


their current ability to supply the operator with the necessary information. For this reason, mundane expectations concerning thecapacities and traits of different groups of people may prove of little value to the work of emergency operators. Accordingly, rather thanbuying into folklore conceptualisations of children as less-than-complete participants in society’s business, our analysis attended to theethno-methods on which participants rely to produce joint activities. This revealed the methodic character of emergency call openings,including the fine-grained tailoring and coordination of actions, as well as the relevant sets of identities invoked and manifested as partof the business of producing and receiving preliminary formulations of emergency incidents.

Acknowledgments

This work was made possible through research grants from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (grant #2005-0236) as well as the Bank of Sweden (RJ grant # P2007-0837:1-E). The authors wish to thank all colleagues who helped disseminating thedata presented in this article at seminars with the Linkoping University ‘‘Talk and interaction group’’ (SIS). We are solely responsible forany shortcomings that remain despite their generous assistance. Most importantly, we thank all the operators at emergency centre SOS-E for bearing with us throughout the fieldwork.

Appendix A1

See appendix Table A1.

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‘‘SOS 112 what has occurred?’’ : Managing openings in children’s emergency calls

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