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Measuring disability: The agency of an attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnostic questionnaire

Scholars in language and social interaction have long been concerned with the role of texts in institutional settings, studying, for example, how interview schedules actively shape conversational dynamics between participants. While texts have been acknowledged as active in this way, their generative capacity remains largely overlooked. This article argues that like human subjects, texts in interaction enact agency. One text in particular, a screening form used to diagnose the learning disability attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is analyzed to claim that this text brings about the very condition it is designed to measure: a learning disability. Drawing from work in discursive psychology, I show how the measurement requires the client to adopt certain speaking positions, which then enables the text to speak for the client. I also demonstrate how the text constructs otherwise normal behavior as pathological through punctuation and nominalization. Finally, I illustrate how the spatial organization of the text constrains clients’ choices for interacting with it. This article claims that texts produce, rather than reflect, cognitive phenomena, and it moreover encourages that the notion of text as agent be taken seriously, especially when it presents the capacity to disable.