Isabella Paoletti

@crisaps.it

Centro ricerca e Intervento Sociale



           

https://researchid.co/isapaole

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Discourse analysis , Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, Ethnography; Interactional Construction of identity in relation to ethnic, gender, age membership; Caregiving of older disabled people, interinstitutional support networks; Technologically Mediated Communication;Ethical issues in research

25

Scopus Publications

Scopus Publications

  • Moral awareness and different orders of relevance in participatory research with older people and professionals
    Isabella Paoletti, Elisabet Cedersund, and Konstantin Economou
    Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH
    Limitations are described in the literature in relation to the actual involvement of older people in action research activities. Empirical social research involving any form of data collection has an impact on the people and the setting studied. Researchers should strive to be morally aware of such an impact. The article describes case studies of participatory research in Sweden, Italy and Portugal. It highlights moral issues confronted by researchers. Moreover actual examples of different order of priorities among researchers and participants are provided. The study shows possible spaces for collaboration, while recognizing the difference of interests and priorities among researchers and participants.





  • Conclusion: Rethinking ageing societies
    Isabella Paoletti
    Routledge

  • BEING AN OLDER WOMAN: A Study in the Social Production of Identity
    Isabella Paoletti
    Routledge
    Contents: Series Editors' Preface. Introduction. Membership Categories in Identity Work. When Is an Older Woman? Institutional Conflicts and Gender Identification. Members' Personal Identities and Institutions. Conclusion: Understanding Social Change. Appendices: Transcript Notations. List of the Data Collected.


  • Dignity and the fourth age
    Isabella Paoletti
    Palgrave Macmillan UK

  • Active Aging and Inclusive Communities: Inter-Institutional Intervention in Portugal
    Isabella Paoletti
    Springer Science and Business Media LLC

  • Ethics and the Social Dimension of Research Activities
    Isabella Paoletti
    Springer Science and Business Media LLC

  • Future talk in later life
    Isabella Paoletti and Sandra Gomes
    Elsevier BV

  • Introduction
    Isabella Paoletti and Elisabet Cedersund
    Equinox Publishing

  • Solving the unsolvable: Narrative practices in social work
    Isabella Paoletti
    Equinox Publishing
    Social workers often confront situations that are practically, legally and morally unsolvable. Storytelling appears to be central to achieving what seems to be unobtainable and unsolvable. Drawing on past research on storytelling within the ethnomethodological tradition, this study aims to examine how storytelling is used in the discussion of very complex and delicate cases by social workers and other professionals. This study is based on data collected for the Aging, Poverty and Social Exclusion (APSE) project, based in Portugal. Through a detailed analysis within an ethnomethodological framework, and informed by conversation analysis of transcripts of inter-professional meetings, the study shows how social workers and other professionals (nurses, policemen, carer coordinators etc.) use stories in fine tuning the details of home visits, clients’ housing conditions and so on. These stories are institutionally framed – that is, they are structured around what is considered right and wrong by a specific institutional gaze. Stories are often used to propose solutions, by telling the stories of similar previous cases. In these stories the professionals highlight their order of relevance and their responsibilities in managing the case. They delineate a sense of direction for social interventions conducted in narrow and tortuous paths, full of pitfalls.

  • The issue of conversationally constituted context and localization problems in emergency calls
    Isabella Paoletti
    Walter de Gruyter GmbH
    AbstractThis paper analyzes localization problems in medical emergency calls. It argues that some localization problems can be related to difficulties in the alignment of operators' and callers' understanding of the overall functioning of the services and, in fact, be linked to the shift in the organization features of the emergency service.The data analyzed in this study are part of a wider corpus collected within a research project on language and technology carried out at the Department of Communication Sciences of the University of Bologna, Italy. The data were collected in two emergency service control rooms in northern Italy and central Italy. Through a detailed discourse analysis within an ethnomethodological framework of actual emergency calls, the analysis shows that some localization problems can be better understood by referring to the overall ethnographic understanding of the emergency service and its organizational development.The paper aims to show that some localization problems can provide some significant insights for the discussion of the issue of “conversationally constituted context” versus “invocation to more remote context” in the analysis of interactional data. The ethnographic understanding of changes in the organization of the emergency services makes understandable elements in the calls that cannot be explained otherwise.

  • Operators managing callers' sense of urgency in calls to the medical emergency number
    Isabella Paoletti
    John Benjamins Publishing Company
    Communication in emergency calls is often agitated and callers almost always speak with a sense of urgency. Call operators often have to struggle in order to get the callers’ cooperation. The questioning sequence is often perceived by callers as inappropriate and a way of delaying assistance, frequently producing annoyance and anger in the caller. Interrupted calls are not uncommon in communications with the call centre, nor are cursing, rudeness and face attacks. The focus of previous studies on emotional work in emergency calls has mainly been devoted to communication problems and the consequences these had on the provision of assistance. This paper aims to focus specifically on how operators manage callers’ anxiety and sense of urgency and the emotions tied to this, such as anger. Transcripts of actual emergency calls are examined through a detailed discourse analysis in order to show operators’ interactional work in maintaining emotional contact with callers. The ability of the operators to control their own emotions and manage those of the caller is an important professional skills in this job. Describing how emotional contact with callers is maintained in actual calls can be useful for training and in-service courses.

  • Communication and diagnostic work in medical emergency calls in Italy
    Isabella Paoletti
    Springer Science and Business Media LLC


  • Globalization of the Other Underdevelopment: Third World Cultural Identities
    Isabella Paoletti
    SAGE Publications
    across time and place, or to typify national characters. Potentially, a panoramic perspective of the kind presented in Comparing Cultures is a particularly attractive complement to the localized perspective that dominates much of contemporary cultural anthropology and cultural studies. The consequence, at least for me, was a pendulum-like reading experience, as part of my professional self was telling me that this was tremendously interesting, while the other responded in amazement to the extreme lifelessness of the outcome. Accordingly, the answer to the ultimate question, ‘is this “good to think”?’, therefore remains somewhat indecisive. It is good, in a way even a relief, to put aside the insistence on multivocality and human complexity for the sake of wondering at the solid, systematic patterns that seem to rise above all. Yet, the suspension of disbelief, necessary for making the magic of statistical models work, is difficult when their language of neutral description is made of the very symbolic constructs (‘masculine/feminine cultures’ is only the most radical example) that anthropologists have laboured to unpack and historicize.

  • Orienting to the category “ordinary - but special” in an Australian-Italian courtship and marriage narrative
    Greer Cavallaro Johnson and Isabella Paoletti
    John Benjamins Publishing Company
    This article explores the possibilities of working ethnomethodological and conversation analysis methods into narrative analytic research, in relation to the understanding of narrative practices and identity work carried out in the course of the interview interaction. More specifically, we discuss how a storyteller (Olivia) in a research interview inserts a complaint story about her mother's intense objection to her choice of partner, into a relatively ordinary romance tale, and subsequently subverts it. Various conversational strategies, such as recipient design, topic shift and evaluation and assessment, are worked alongside the narrative dimensions of tellibility, tellership and moral stance (Ochs & Capps, 2001) to demonstrate the narrative achievement of an ordinary – but special – identity, in the retelling of events related to Olivia's courtship and the first few weeks of her marriage. (Australian-Italian Narrative Research, Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis)

  • Caring for older people: A gendered practice
    Isabella Paoletti
    SAGE Publications
    This article discusses how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can contribute to the feminist study of caregiving. Interviews with caregivers of older relatives with disabilities were analyzed using a detailed conversation and membership categorization analysis within an ethnomethodological framework. The interviews were treated analytically as interactional encounters, useful to document instances of identity production and moral versions of oneself as a caregiver. The study describes some instances of the moral and relational universe in which caring practices are embedded, exploring the discursive construction of caring. Caring duties were shown to be bound to kin relationships, but significant gendering was evident in the attribution of caring responsibilities.

  • Membership categories and time appraisal in interviews with family caregivers of disabled elderly


  • Being a foreigner in primary school
    Isabella Paoletti
    Informa UK Limited
    This paper presents how the identity of the foreign student is interactionally produced in the course of ordinary educational activities. In a detailed discourse analysis within an ethnomethodological framework, I show instances of the social production of primary school students as 'foreign' in and through the interaction with other students, the teachers and the researchers, as well as in relation to school knowledge, classroom discourses and practices. Being a foreigner is shown to be socially produced and to have various meanings and implications at both the personal and institutional level. It may imply marginalisation but also positive integration.

  • A half life: Women caregivers of older disabled relatives
    Isabella Paoletti
    Informa UK Limited
    This paper explores the impact of caring on caregivers' life style and health. Interviews were carried out with women caregivers over 50 years old. Transcripts from the interview are analyzed through a detailed discourse analysis within an ethnomethodological framework showing how the caring tasks are constructed in the interaction as a women's duty, inscribed in a gendered moral order. A difference is noticeable between family caregivers who describe the caring tasks as the cause of intense stress, physical and psychological problems and voluntary or paid caregivers who see caring as a source of satisfaction and well being.

  • Interpreting classroom climate: A study in a year five and six class
    Isabella Paoletti
    Informa UK Limited
    This paper argues that classroom “climate” is not static and cannot be measured or described objectively. Rather, it is to be described from different perspectives. The paper compares and analyzes student's and teacher's perception of the classroom from a study done in a combined year five and six class in a small town Catholic school in New South Wales.