This study describes the ways in which professionals in two contexts of health care: general practice and homeopathic consultations, respond to patients' affective expressions of a trouble or a problem. The focus is on the turns of professionals that display understanding, compassion or agreement with the patient's account. Different types of affiliative turns are described and their consequences for the following interaction are scrutinized in relation to the institutional task of solving the patients' health-related problems. It is shown that in (...) both contexts, affiliation is oriented to as working towards closing the sequence of troubles-telling and serves to shift back to problem-solving activity, whilst in homeopathy, it may also serve as a means to problem-solving and thus help to complete the institutional task at hand. Some implications of these observations for professional—client interaction will be described. To conclude, the role of emotion in institutional interaction will also be discussed. (shrink)

Background: Enhancing client autonomy requires close coordination of interactional practices between nurse and client, which can cause challenges when interaction takes place in video-mediated settings. While video-mediated services have become more common, it remains unclear how they shape client autonomy in telehomecare. Research aim: To analyse how video mediation shapes client autonomy when nurses guide medicine taking remotely through video-mediated home care. Research design: This is a conversation analytic case study using video recordings of telehomecare encounters. The theoretical approach draws (...) on ethnomethodology and empirical ethics. Participants and research context: Four home-dwelling older adults and three nurses participated in the data collection; data extracts include one client and two nurses. The study was conducted in Finland. Ethical considerations: Special attention was given to protect the rights of home care clients. An ethical statement for the study was given by the Ethics Committee of the Tampere Region Findings: Video mediation complicates interacting remotely with care-relevant artefacts because of nurses’ limited visual access to the medicine and client’s need to simultaneously engage in vocal interaction and medicine taking. This can be overcome by dividing the guidance into manageable steps which invite the client to explicate their readiness to take the medicine and situating the video-mediation equipment and medicine close together. Different interactional practices and ways of situating video-mediation equipment and medicine have consequences for client autonomy. Discussion: Understanding client autonomy in digitalised settings demands empirical examination that recognises the importance of different human and non-human aspects of care that shape client autonomy. Conclusions: To harness the benefits of video-mediated home care, communication technologies’ reliance on home space and interactional practices should be recognised. Empirical ethics research is needed in order to make normative suggestions that fit a wide variety of care situation. (shrink)

Reflective processing is a joint social action that develops in interaction. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this article focuses on self-reflective turns of talk in group counselling for adults at risk of type 2 diabetes. We show how reflective processing unfolds in patterns of interaction, wherein group members take an observing, evaluating or interpreting position towards their own actions and experiences. Self-reflective talk is neither exclusively dependent on counsellors’ actions nor limited to the niches the counselling programme structure offers. (...) Self-reflective talk is one method of generating joint reflective processing. Such talk makes a topic available for discussion by connecting details of counselling with individuals’ experiences and enabling sharing. Self-reflective talk thus serves as a way for group members to participate in constructing a lifestyle problem, to invite or provide sharing of experiences and to display their orientation to the institutional task at hand. (shrink)

This article investigates how age categorisation and prejudicial use of age are mobilised in talk by job applicants during job interviews and how recruiters affiliate with these. The institutional goal of recruitment is to ensure an unbiased process and evaluation, nevertheless, ageism against older workers emerges as unchallenged and culturally acceptable in authentic job interviews. In line with the discursive psychology (DP) approach, the analysis focuses on -isms as discursively constructed and categories as resources to accomplish social actions. A case (...) study is conducted based on video recordings of 24 real job interviews held at an Italian staffing agency and analysed through membership categorisation and conversation analysis. The analysis provides evidence of how job applicants resort to age co-membership with recruiters to achieve affiliation – or remedy misalignment – by complaining about older workers. The study contributes to DP’s re-specification of prejudices as interactional practices and links microanalysis to macro phenomena, such as ageism, through categorisation practices. (shrink)