Context that matters: Producing “thick-enough descriptions” in initial emergency reports

This article examines how troublesome events are described in children's emergency calls. In focus for the analysis are the procedures through which participants methodically deal with contextual information concerning the reported emergency event during the early phases of the call, i.e., up to the point where the operator is able to set emergency priority. This choice is motivated by a set of institutional concerns that surface in the interaction typically, but not solely, through the operator's ways of receiving and managing the caller's unfolding report. The initial phase of emergency calls thus offers a locus of order, a phenomenon in itself, in addition to offering access to some of the finer details of sequential and categorical organisation of interaction in emergency calls. Applying Ryle's (1968) distinction between ‘thin’ vs. ‘thick’ description (roughly, the description of an observed event vs. description of the meaning of an observed event) to the reporting of emergencies, we argue that determining the relevant level of ‘thickness’ is, above all, a task for the participants themselves. Hence, our analysis shows that interaction during the early phases of emergency calls is distinctively geared towards producing a ‘thick-enough’ description of the reported event. These findings are discussed in terms of the methodological problem of how features of the context can enter interaction analytic accounts of institutional exchanges. Specifically, we argue that relevant features of context ‘brought along’ to emergency calls (to do, for instance, with operators’ institutional agendas or callers’ situations) are also ‘brought about’ by the participants as part of the interactional work through which one party's observations are jointly transformed into descriptions that form accountable reports of emergency events.