The nature of the link between identity and action is a fundamental question for social science. One focus in psychology is how actions like seeking help are implicated in matters of identity. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of identity and help in social interaction. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 400 recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how participants oriented to the link between identity and help. With attention to epistemic, deontic, and affective relations between participants, I analysed how identity was demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential for building and interpreting help-seeking requests. Participants displayed an understanding that seeking help from Victim Support necessarily implicates identity. Callers’ identities as victims or clients rendered their help-seeking accountable and invoked identities for call-takers as representatives of a support service. The findings show that identity and help are mutually constitutive. Seeking help constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities as victims constituted their requests for help. I suggest that analysing identity and help in social interaction provides evidence for the mutually constitutive link between identity and action.

中文翻译：

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身份和行动：呼叫受害者支持服务时的求助请求

身份和行动之间联系的本质是社会科学的一个基本问题。心理学的一个重点是寻求帮助之类的行为如何与身份问题有关。本文提出了对社会互动中的身份和帮助的话语心理学研究。我利用近 400 个对受害者支持热线的电话录音，分析了参与者如何看待身份和帮助之间的联系。通过关注参与者之间的认知、道义和情感关系，我分析了身份如何与构建和解释寻求帮助的请求明显相关并在程序上产生影响。参与者表现出一种理解，即寻求受害者支持的帮助必然涉及身份。呼叫者作为受害者或客户的身份使他们的寻求帮助负责，并为呼叫接受者作为支持服务的代表调用了身份。研究结果表明，认同和帮助是相互构成的。寻求帮助构成了来电者的受害者身份；他们作为受害者的身份构成了他们的求助请求。我建议分析身份和社会互动中的帮助为身份和行动之间的相互构成联系提供了证据。