Advice Giving and Advice Resistance on Telephone Helplines

This chapter overviews research on advice in telephone helplines and considers some of the implications for application. It shows that by working with some basic features of advice delivery highlighted by conversation analysts, we can start to understand several elements of the different ways in which advice can be delivered. This also applied to some of the ways in which resistance is built. With respect to helplines, call takers typically are highly knowledgeable about the technical arena in which the call center is based, whereas callers have primary access to their financial situation, housing, locality, and all the myriad details of their lives. The chapter shows how these knowledge asymmetries and other delicate moral implications of giving and receiving advice, such as the way it imposes on recipients some future action that is appropriate, beneficial, required, and so on, can have important effects on both advice delivery and resistance.