‘‘I’m the ghost hunter’’: Self-disclosure and its membership categorization in Chinese police interrogations of suspects

Abstract

Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA), this study investigates how and for what institutional goals, Chinese police officers, through doing self-disclosure, manipulate the membership categories of their own and the suspects and set up relational pairs in their interrogations of suspects. Analyzing 47 episodes of authentic police interrogations of suspects, we find that Chinese police officers’ self-disclosures coalesce around membership categorization in four ways: 1) the co-membership categorization to achieve account-challenging; 2) the co-membership categorization to realize persuasion; 3) the bonded relational pairing that entails a bond with suspects via standardized relational pairs to perform persuasion; 4) the conflictive relational pairing that showcases a conflict against suspects through relational pairs to accomplish accusation. The categorization practices underlying self-disclosures work to facilitate the institutional goals of persuasion and education (PE) of suspects in the Chinese context. Overall, these findings give a glimpse into the dynamic process of membership categorization between the Chinese police and the suspects during interrogations and offer a fresh perspective for analyzing self-disclosure practices in specific contexts.