"Risky business": Exploring practical trust in talk about substance use, drinking and other risk behaviors

This paper investigates risk talk in social work encounters. People with dual diagnosis (mental illness
and a comorbid substance use disorder), often find themselves in vulnerable and marginalized
positions in society and many regularly engage in what can conventionally be labelled ‘risk behavior’.
In this paper we explore the discursive construction of risk in encounters between people with dual
diagnosis and the social workers tasked with supporting them, and how this underpins an ongoing
negotiation and construction of practical trust (González-Martínez & Mlynář, 2019).
Data are from a large corpus of audio recordings of naturally occurring interactions at a municipal
social psychiatric housing facility for people with dual diagnosis and are collected in the project Trust
in (re)socializing interactions (#TIES). Using Conversation Analysis we explore the interactional
strategies and practices employed by social workers and citizens when talking about risks and risk
behavior. Previous studies have pointed to interactional strategies for managing risk such as uptake to
troubles talk (Jefferson & Lee, 1981); mirroring (Ferrera, 1994; Lindwall, 2022) in talk about B-
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events (Labov & Fanshel, 1977); and delivering advice as information to avoid advice giving in talk
about risk (Silverman, 1997). However, the interactional work of upgrading, downgrading, and
normalizing risk in social work talk about behavior and circumstances conventionally linked to risk is
understudied.
In our data we show how interactants discuss, evaluate, and relativize the residents' risk behavior;
what we in these interactions may infer about the vulnerability of the residents, and thus how an
ongoing negotiation and in situ orientation to both individual trustworthiness(Nielsen & Nielsen,
2022) and mutual trust (Jørgensen, 2017, 2018) may be accomplished. We see participants normalize
risk factors by means of itemized positive assessments, integrating high- and low-risk factors in
interactional strategies such as lists and if-then construction, as well as absence of delicacy marking,
addressing risk as merely a matter of inconvenience, financial challenge, or discomfort, and how
explanation slots and accounts are deployed. Our findings contribute to the understanding of risk talk
in social work settings as well as the interactional construction of practical trust.