The use of obviously in bolstering parental accounts within child mental health interviews

Parents presenting their child for assessment within Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services must navigate a delicate landscape of epistemic asymmetry. While parents possess experiential knowledge of a child’s emotional or behavioural difficulties, clinical staff possess professional stocks of knowledge about diagnostic criteria. This article analyses one of the linguistic resources parents can be seen to use in the rhetorical task of persuading clinical staff of the validity of their case for treatment: the use of the adverb obviously in building accounts of their child’s difficulties. Our analysis is based on a corpus of 26 recorded, naturally occurring family assessment interviews, collected during a research project in collaboration with a British city-based Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. The data were transcribed and analysed using the procedures of conversation analysis. The findings show that in this asymmetrical discourse context, obviously is not merely used as an evidential, or epistemic, resource. The item is also bound up with a range of normative dimensions through which parents seek to construct persuasive accounts of their child’s emotional and behavioural difficulties, whilst inoculating their own parenting skills against the risk of negative judgement.