Respecifying 'worry': Service and emotion in welfare encounters

This paper uses Discursive Psychology (DP) to investigate formulations of worry as an interactional resource. DP conceptualizes emotion as something people display or formulate in interaction with other people, and draws on conversation analysis (CA) to examine its social functions across settings. Data consist of 366 recorded phone calls to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency's customer service for housing allowance - a benefit targeting financially vulnerable youth and families. The article examines how clients' worry is formulated (e.g., 'I'm really worried now'), what functions such formulations serve, and how they are responded to. In line with the broader DP goal of uncovering how institutions are characterized by psychological business, the study shows how worry is linked to lack of knowledge, building worry as warranted and as warranting further institutional activity (or not). Speakers thus treat worry as morally and institutionally constrained. The analysis shows how orientations to worry in the context of state welfare customer service both corresponds and contrasts with what research on worry formulations in other institutional settings has found. This highlights the way that psychology is locally specific and bound up with institutionality, and reinforces the need for close empirical analysis of psychology-relevant matters across settings.