Conversational displays of mediator neutrality in a court-based program

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.