Conversational displays of mediator neutrality in a court-based program [An article from: Journal of Pragmatics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This study examines conversational interaction in order to describe the conversational features of mediator neutrality in a court-based community mediation program. Data for the study were video recordings of actual mediation sessions with participants who were volunteer mediators and disputants who filed small claims cases. Conversation methods for maintaining neutrality included self-labeling, unbiased paraphrasing, perspective display invitations, footing, and replies to disputant information seeking attempts. These conversational structures display neutrality in that they neither affiliate nor disaffiliate with either disputant. Through an examination of mediator neutrality, this work contributes in potentially important ways to the pragmatics literature and to theorizing about neutrality by examining neutrality as an interactive phenomenon.