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I've tried it and it didn't work: how healthcare professionals deal with explicit objections to their advice
Seminar details
Steven Bloch gave the QHRN seminar in May 2022
Title: I've tried it and it didn't work: how healthcare professionals deal with explicit objections to their advice
Date: Wednesday 4th May 2022
Time: 13:00-14:00 (UK time)
Location: Zoom
Abstract
Conversation analysis (CA) is a qualitative approach to the study of social interaction and ‘talk-in-interaction’. Utilising recordings of unscripted, naturalistic conversations it is used to describe how people organise their social words through interaction. It does not attempt to ask why we do what we do (tell stories, give and receive advice, gossip about others etc.) but rather how these things are accomplished. Typically CA works at level of turns in talk and how turns create sequences of actions.
In this seminar I will present audio recorded data, and accompanying transcripts, from the Parkinson’s UK telephone helpline corpus (in collaboration with Professor Charles Antaki, Loughborough University). Like most health helpline services, this features people calling to seek professional advice on a range of issues relating to a health condition. A problem for anyone dispensing advice is that what they offer may not be readily accepted by the recipient. This raises the question: how do professionals deal with callers’ explicit objections to their advice? I argue that one important distinction among objections is their epistemic domain - whether the objection is in the caller's world (e.g. pain on having previously tried the proposed course of action), or in the world of the practitioner (e.g. delays making appointments). I will show that the practitioner, where possible, tries to manoeuvre the objection onto grounds where their own expertise will win the day.
Biography
Steven Bloch is an Associate Professor in communication disorders and social interaction at UCL. He graduated as a speech and language therapist from Birmingham Polytechnic in 1991. Following 12 years of clinical practice in adult community settings, and an interest in conversation analysis (CA), he was awarded his PhD at University College London investigating the everyday interactions of people with progressive speech loss arising from motor neurone disease (MND). He continued this work as a post-doc NIHR Research Fellow. He has subsequently been a panel member of the NICE MND Clinical Guidelines group and published widely in the field of communication disorders, end of life health conversations and telephone helpline interactions, all from a CA perspective. His current funded work includes the development and piloting of a new therapy programme to support better conversations for people with Parkinson’s.
Email: s.bloch@ucl.ac.uk
Twitter: @steven_bloch
Seminar Recording