Healthcare

The chief investigators launched the healthcare domain project in 2014 through an initial comparative study with the aim of identifying national variation in healthcare interactions. This part of the project used data from two existing corpora: Camilla Lindholm’s corpus of Finland Swedish doctor-patient interactions (the INK corpus) and Ulla Melander Marttala’s corpus of Sweden Swedish doctor-patient interactions (the LOP corpus). These corpora are comparable: they represent the same activity type (medical consultation) dealing with the same kind of patient problems.

The main part of the healthcare domain project is conducted by two postdocs, Inga-Lill Grahn (Gothenburg) and Martina Huhtamäki (Helsinki), in collaboration with the chief investigators Jan Lindström (Helsinki) and Jenny Nilsson (Gothenburg). The focus is on the domain of preventive healthcare (Sw. friskvård) in Finland and Sweden respectively. Preventive healthcare focuses on life habits and lifestyles, and aims at promoting the individual’s physical wellbeing through exercise, fitness and health information.

The postdoctoral healthcare projects will have a pronounced ethnographic approach. Data will be collected through observations, interviews and video recorded activities of different types that are arranged by organizations supplying preventive healthcare. As in the education project, the aim is to give both an overview of the communicative activities within the overall activity type, and to focus on specific communicative actions that might emerge as central in talk-in-interaction. At the moment the postdoc project is engaged in data collection in the field, to be able to start working with the analysis.

Publications

For publications from this initial phase of the healthcare domain project, see:

Publications IVIP