Communication Conduct on Fm Addis 97.1’S Hiv/Aids Phone-In Program
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Date
2015-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study examines how communication is conducted in a „lived‟ radio phone-in program about HIV/AIDS and related matters by narrowing its focus onto the context of the practice in FM Addis 97.1, a broadcasting station in Ethiopia. Previous works on institutional discourse and perspectives from Goffmanian and ethnomethodology-based approaches were drawn on in framing the theoretical and methodological foundations. The data were primarily collected by recording „lived‟ radio phone-in productions in the target communication setting. The corpus for analysis was assembled by making detailed transcriptions of the recordings of the participants‟ speech exchanges on two randomly selected themes: „Blood Testing Experience for HIV-antibody‟ and „Challenges in (to) being Faithful‟, which together lasted about fifteen hours.
The analysis of these transcripts reveals that communication is organized in a way that places the program host, the caller, the guest or expert and the audiences in the participation framework. Although the actual speech exchange in the program appears to be made either between the host and the caller or the host and the guest, it seems to be primarily shaped for and by the audience who listen to that program. While interaction between the host and the guest is found to constitute part of the production, the speech exchange of the hosts and the callers appears to be central in the making up of the program. This exchange involves three broader phases: the openings, „doing‟ the talk and the closure. Each of these phases is observed to have distinctive features. The participants display their orientations to such features through a reliance on predictable combinations of moves, which are realized through a limited range of speech acts and conversational routines. With respect to the construction of roles and identities, it is observed that the participants‟ discourse roles appear to be made relevant in many ways, with explicit role definitions by the host and with implicit negotiations by the participants. Their identities are found to be built through a reflexive combination of sequential and categorical methods as the interaction unfolds. Regarding the construction of power relationship, the analysis reveals that asymmetrical power relationship is not that characterize all that is happening in the target site, and that asymmetrical power relationship manifest in this setting tend to be not an outcome of just social structural difference between the participants but (mainly) of an interactional accomplishment which is made evident in and through the joint interaction moves by the parties involved. This study argues that the target radio phone-in participants tend to enact from multiplicity of roles, align and disalign with some form of actions, and position each other symmetrically and asymmetrically to the attainment of the program‟s goal: modeling of a desirable health behavior and stance.
The study outlines the implications of making a fine-grained analysis of talk in a radio phone-in program to future practices and pre-and in-service trainings of hosts. Finally, the study makes some suggestions as to what the hosts of a radio phone-in program might do to improve the way interactions are managed, and points out areas worth examining in future studies of the sort.
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Addis 97.1’S Hiv/Aids Phone-In Program