Question and Response Dynamics in Public Service Encounters

Abstract

When deciding on social welfare benefits, street-level bureaucrats wield significant discretionary power over citizens. One of the key instruments of this power lies in the questioning patterns that control the conversational agenda in face-to-face encounters. In turn, the citizens’ responses show how they navigate these conversational constraints, for instance by answering directly or through more evasive strategies. To shed light on the power dynamics inherent in these encounters, we provide over 200 verbatim transcripts of authentic conversations in German between street-level bureaucrats and citizens, as well as a fully annotated dataset of all question-response pairs extracted from these conversations. We also present PSE v2.0, which is double the size of the only previously available corpus of spoken interactions in street-level bureaucracy. Keywords: Public Service Encounters, verbatim transcripts, question-response pairs

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