'This very difficult debate about Wik': stake, voice and the management of category memberships in race politics.

The issue of 'race' has assumed an extraordinarily salient position in Australian politics since the election of the conservative Howard government in 1996. Central to debate in the Australian policy has been the nature of the relationship between indigenous, or Aboriginal, Australians and the rest of the population, in particular over the issue of the land rights of indigenous people. Land rights, or 'native title', assumed a pre-eminent position in national political life in 1996/97 with the handing down by the High Court of the so-called 'Wik judgment'. The discursive management of the ensuing debate by Australia's political leaders is illuminative of key sites of interest in the analysis of political rhetoric and the construction of 'racially sensitive' issues. Taking the texts of 'addresses to the nation' on Wik by the leaders of the two major political parties as analytic materials, we examine two features of the talk. First, examine how the speakers manage their stake in the position they advance, with an extension of previous work on reported speech into the area of set-piece political rhetoric. Second, in contrast to approaches which treat social categories as routine, mundane and unproblematic objects, we demonstrate the local construction of category memberships and their predicates as strategic moves in political talk. Specifically, we demonstrate how the categories of 'Aborigines' and 'farmers', groups central to the dispute, are strategically constructed to normatively bind certain entitlements to activity to category membership. Furthermore, inasmuch as such categories do not, in use, reflect readily perceived 'objective' group entities in the 'real' world, so too 'standard' discursive devices and rhetorical structures are themselves shown to be contingently shaped and strategically deployed for contrasting local, ideological and rhetorical ends.

Staff:staff and staff:client reliability of the Schalock & Keith (1993) Quality of Life Questionnaire.

A small-scale study of the inter-rater and staff:client reliability of the Schalock & Keith (1993) Quality of Life Questionnaire (QOL-Q) was conducted. Whilst the sample size was small and the QOL-Q achieved an acceptable overall level of reliability, the study replicated the pattern of low staff:client concordance and staff overestimation of the independence and autonomy of clients reported by Reiter & Bendov (1996). The results are briefly discussed in the context of the ongoing debate about the utility of proxy response in the literature.

Questions and answers to psychological assessment schedules: hidden troubles in 'quality of life' interviews.

Quality of life (QOL) has become a topic of much debate in the learning difficulties literature. Increasing use is made of questionnaire-driven interview schedules in an effort to find out what clients believe in their own words. However, in this paper, the authors argue that the use made of such questionnaires may actually distort interviewees' 'own words' by severely underestimating the degree to which the questions and answers are changed by the subtle dynamics of the interview. In the first ever close examination of what actually happens in a QOL assessment interview, the qualitative insights of conversation analysis are used to show that the typical administration of a well-known instrument will involve: (1) distortions of the questions brought about by the need to paraphrase complex items, and the inevitable use of pre-questions and response listing; and perhaps more disturbingly, (2) distortions of answers brought about by interviewers' pursuit of legitimate answers and non-take-up of interviewees' matters. The authors believe that these difficulties make it hard for researchers to draw conclusions from simple aggregation of recorded responses to this questionnaire, and, perhaps, to any questionnaire using a fixed-response schedule. On the other hand, the kind of close evidence used here may allow inferences to be drawn about clients' feelings of well being, but even so, these will need to be cast in terms which acknowledge the interactive and constructive nature of feeling-avowals.