Ways people manage risks, social roles, and relationships in communicating about difficult emotions in hospice consultations

The project will investigate communication of difficult emotions including fear and distress in the context of terminal illness. I will examine an existing corpus of video-recordings of hospice consultations involving patients with life limiting illness, their companions, and healthcare practitioners (HCPs: palliative medicine doctors, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists). Prior work shows these parties can treat communication of emotional matters with equivocality regarding whether and how they should be a focus and marked sensitivity; one way of doing so is to hint at the presence of an emotional concern. Emotions relating to one's death are amongst the most difficult to experience and communicate about. In this project, the focus will be on when patients make moves that can initiate such communication. This will contribute to social-scientific understandings of how people negotiate whether and how difficult emotions are talked about, building on and adding to prior research in this area (Bericat, 2015; Peräkylä and Sorjonen 2012).

The methodology of this project is conversation analysis (CA). CA is a rigorous approach to the systematic study of how people socially interact through talk. It is widely applied to studying of how practitioners and patients interact in healthcare services. The strength of CA is its capacity to characterise in detail how people implement social actions through talk and other communicative resources (e.g., the non-verbal). CA provides empirically grounded insights into the ways in which participants' actions reflect and are shaped by broader concerns, such as orientations to social roles and relationships.

The project will provide novel contributions to social scientific understandings of how people negotiate the expression of difficult emotions in their interactions. The study also has implications for applied communication research.