Abstract (eng)
The present master thesis deals with the asylum seeking procedure in Austria, in particular with the interview conducted by a staff member of the Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum (Vienna) as part of the asylum application. The focus is on those persons (persons of trust/confidants) who support asylum seekers and accompany them to the interview.
The person of trust is allowed to be present at the interview, but any active participation is forbidden. Thus, the accompanying person seems to have a clearly defined role, but a closer look at the communicative situation reveals that s/he is confronted with significant contradictions. In order to uncover these, data was collected in the course of the empirical study and interpreted on the basis of Franz Breuer’s Reflexive Grounded Theory (vgl. Breuer et al. 2019). The results of the study document that although a passive role is assigned to the person of trust, s/he takes advantage of the possibilities that emerge to support the asylum seeker. These findings were then analysed within the framework of Paul Watzlawick’s communication theory, which constitutes the theoretical basis of the present master thesis. What becomes clear is that the officially assigned situation of „present but not participating“ contains a paradox: all participants in the interview communicate actively as, according to Watzlawick, “you cannot not communicate” (Watzlawick et al. 1969: 60). Any prohibition of interaction or participation can therefore only touch the verbal part of communication, which is important as a basis to take action; from a communication theoretical point of view, however, this is neither the only nor the central level of communication. The persons of trust interviewed for the present study are aware of this discrepancy between the officially assigned passive role and their ‚active’ participation in the communicative situation, and they perceive their role as contradictive.