When decisions are asserted by HCPs there is a possible dissonance between the tenets of SDM in British health policy and what occurs in situ. This highlights an educational need for HCPs in how best to afford labouring women more optionality, particularly in low-risk contexts.

How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This article presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon and its transcribed recordings as public data. We examine the inherent contradictions that conversation analysis is simultaneously obscure yet highly cited; it studies an object that people understand intuitively, yet routinely produces counter-intuitive findings about talk. We describe a novel methodology for engaging the public in a science exhibition event and show how our ‘conversational rollercoaster’ used live recording, transcription and public-led analysis to address the challenge of demonstrating how talk can become an informative object of scientific research. We conclude by encouraging researchers not only to engage in a public dialogue but also to find ways to actively engage people in taking a scientific approach to talk as a pervasive, structural feature of their everyday lives.

This paper examines the use of "just"-formulated advisings in ordinary, naturally-occurring sequences of unsolicited advice-giving when produced in response to troubles-tellings. Drawing on two examples from our broader collection, we demonstrate that such advisings are employed in response to advice-resistance and function to minimise proposed courses of future action, attenuating their imposing nature. We show they place an interactional bind upon advice-recipients which contributes towards further resistance. This paper explicates this bind and its categorial, epistemic and moral implications. Data are in American and British English. In their seminal research on the rejection of advice, Jefferson and Lee (1980; 1981/1992) demonstrated that advice-giving is oriented to as a misaligned response to troubles-tellings, and routinely occasions resistance from troubles-tellers. They explain this resistance on categorial grounds; namely, if a troubles-teller were to accept advice from an interlocutor, this would proposedly transform their discourse identity from that of a "troubles-teller" to an "advice-recipient", substituting the categorial perquisites (e.g. entitlements, rights, obligations, etc.) that are normatively afforded by the incumbency of the former category with those associated with the latter. Likewise, the previously positioned "troubles-recipient" would proposedly transform their discourse identity to that of an "advice-giver", claiming the perquisites that are implicated, normatively, by the incumbency of the latter category. As Jefferson and Lee (1980; 1981/1992) observe, this disrupts the progressivity of the troublestelling. The previously positioned troubles-recipient hasby misaligning with their categorial positioning as suchinitiated a transformation of the interaction from a "troubles-telling" to a "service encounter", focusing off the troubles-teller and his/her experiences, and focusing on the trouble as a 'problem to be solved' (Jefferson and Lee, 1981: 416). The production of advice-giving in response to a troubles-telling thus engenders 'interactional asynchrony' (Jefferson and Lee, 1981: 402), with interlocutors pursuing two diverging interactional trajectories. In this paper, we revisit the period of interactional misalignment to hone in on a peculiar feature that recurs in responses to advice resistance; namely, the delivery of "just"-formulated advisings. Examples of this practice include the following.