Joint decision making provides the basis for democratic participation within the whole society. During the last decades its role has also become increasingly central in various contexts, such as working life and health care. Joint decision-making is challenging in that it requires that a person has both the capacity to exercise control over the agenda of interaction and the ability to respond flexibly to others’ analogous attempts. Individuals with mental illness may experience specific problems that constitute a barrier towards genuinely joint decision making (Beitinger et al. 2014; Stovell et al. 2016).
In this project, we will collect naturally occurring interaction data to consider how problems of mental health become manifest in the turn-by-turn unfolding of joint decision-making interaction. While there is much knowledge about the deficits in the individual decision-making capacities in individuals with mental illness (Ernst & Paulus 2005; Larquet et al. 2010), the project broadens the view by investigating real-life encounters where decisions are established together with others. Our ultimate aim is to yield new knowledge on how to enhance the possibilities of genuine participation in joint decision-making for persons with mental illness.