Communicating about end of life and related matters in hospice consultations

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. Observational research will examine an existing corpus of video-recordings of hospice consultations involving patients with a terminal illness, their companions, and healthcare practitioners (HCPs: palliative medicine doctors, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists). The supervisors' prior work shows these parties 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 (through 'cues'). Emotions relating to one's death are amongst the most difficult to experience and communicate about, making our video corpus particularly valuable for examining communication of difficult emotions. The supervisors have previously investigated how HCPs attempt to launch talk about difficult emotions (Pino et al., 2016). 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).

Research questions:
(1) At what points within the consultations do patients hint at their emotional concerns relating to dying?
(2) In what ways do patients hint at these concerns?
(3) In what ways do HCPs respond?
(4) How do findings in this specific context reflect and extend social-scientific understandings of the character, construction, and management of difficult emotions?