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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Constructions of Agency in Accounts of Drunk Driving at the Outset of Semi-Mandatory Counseling

subject

description

Convicted drunk drivers, in accounts of their offenses, rarely display qualities of agency that would contribute to a favorable outcome in counseling. Instead, the discursive and rhetorical aim of the accounts is often to evade responsibility and ownership of the offending behavior. Such disclaim of personal agency can be achieved in various ways in the narration of drunk driving (DD) incidences. This study examined how five aspects of agentic presentation (reflexivity, historicity, intentionality, causal attribution, and relationality) were present in or missing from such accounts. It was found that a tentative model of (non)agentic display based on those five aspects could differentiate between the cases in a meaningful way and contribute to an understanding of the clients’ ways of positioning themselves in semi-mandatory counseling as well as of their uses of the counseling context.