Affiliating and disaffiliating with complaints

The following dissertation considers the practices involved in affiliating and disaffiliating with complaints in everyday, naturally-occurring interaction. Much work has been done to explore the practices involved in complaining itself, both in institutional and everyday settings but recipient responses are yet to be explored in such detail. This dissertation looks at data from existing corpora of phone calls and in-person interactions between friends, family and colleagues to (1) outline the three main complaint types found in interaction, then uses conversation analysis to (2) highlight the practices involved in affiliating and disaffiliating with complaints. In a conclusive discussion, I then (3) recognise the potential categorisation of these practices on a continuum ranging from explicitly affiliative to explicitly disaffiliative, acknowledging the position of non-affiliation as an additional response type.