Full Description
This book integrates perspectives from conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology to shed light on doctor-patient communication in asynchronous web-based interactions through the lens of the discourse of comfort. While previous research has been done in this space on face-to-face encounters, this book seeks to bring further attention to comfort in online text interactions between doctors and patients, examining its capacity to convey emotional support, encourage "troubles-telling", and facilitate problem solving in medical encounters. A discursive psychology approach provides a complementary perspective to ethnomethodology and CA frameworks, applied to an extensive corpus with data scraping in Python. While Chinese data is featured, this integrated approach allows for a nuanced view of the differences between spoken and online interactions as well as the role of technology in the organization of talk and doctor-patient communication more broadly.
This book will be valuable reading for students and scholars interested in talk-in-interaction, CA, health communication, language and health, pragmatics, and social psychology.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Introduction: Toward an interactional understanding of comforting and online healthcare
Chapter 2 Preliminaries and methodology
Chapter 3 "This is quite common": Normalizing and reassuring
Chapter 4 Showing compassion
Chapter 5 Rendering bad news bivalent
Chapter 6 Resistance to comfort and its management
Chapter 7 Summary, emergent themes, and future directions
Index
