In this article, we develop an exploratory analysis of some of the interactional strategies developed by palliative care (PC) professionals in order to prepare end-of-life (EoL) talks with patients and their families, namely in the frame of specifically social problem-solving work which they develop on a daily basis. In this sense, our object of analysis is not EoL talks in themselves, but the broader social processes that tend to precede them in PC, that is, all the work both of approaching the patient and his or her family and of coordination within the teams that PC professionals routinely do in order to propitiate EoL talk. In this way, we don’t envisage EoL talks as a conversation between two parties, with a patient on one side and a doctor on the other side, but as a wider social process which relies upon strong and previous professional engagement. The analysis conducted herein was carried out on data collected under the projects ETIC – Managing EoL trajectories in palliative care: a study on the work of healthcare professionals (Ref. PTDC/SOC-SOC/30092/2017) and Building paths towards death: an analysis of everyday work in palliative care (Ref. PTDC/CS-SOC/119621/2010), both financed by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT); in particular the data obtained through 17 months (12 in the first project and 5 in the second one, still in progress) of ethnographic observation carried out at two hospital internment units providing PC in Mainland Portugal and 42 (37 in the first project and 5 in the second one, still in progress) in-depth interviews to professionals in PC – physicians, nurses, and social workers. As main results, we present several theoretical and empirical elements relevant to the analysis of the field of EoL communication in the context of interactions between healthcare professionals, patients and their families. Following earlier studies on the same theme, we show how the work of preparing EoL conversations refers to a broader social process preceding those conversations. We believe that our findings may contribute to elucidating this dimension of the intervention of PC professionals, thus being instrumental for the future definition of systematised guidelines and recommendations in the framework of PC.
In social work practice, keeping records of encounters with clients is a routinized practice for documenting cases. This paper focuses on the specific task of obtaining the prospective clients' correct address for filling in a standardized personal report form. My analysis focuses in the way both the client(s) and the social worker cooperatively orient to the practice of writing addresses, showing how this apparently simple task is multimodally implemented within interaction, and how it can generate some complications and expansions. A special focus will be devoted to difficulties encountered by clients to give their address in an adequate way, as well as to the transformation of this activity from an individual to a collective task.
In service encounters between social workers and clients, professionals introduce clients to specific bureaucratic procedures required by the institution and provide assistance in handling problems related to their institutional affairs. Here, paper-based documents are treated by the participants as relevant objects containing important textual information about clients’ rights and obligations, and duly presented by professionals to clients so to inform them of relevant matters at hand. Based on a corpus of video recordings of Social Work encounters in Portugal, and taking a multimodal conversation analytical approach, this study examines how social workers present paper documents to clients and how, through talk and bodily conduct, they ensure clients’ ability to inspect and make sense of relevant information, managing practical problems concerning clients’ access to documents and knowledge of the information contained therein.
Given the emphasis on communication in social work, the empirical study of social work interactions is an important area for research. By examining recordings of naturally occurring social interaction and analysing participants’ practices in close detail, conversation analysis (CA) provides rigorous resources for understanding the practical challenges and opportunities of professional intervention. Since the origins of CA in the 1970s, this approach has been used for investigating interactions in a wide range of institutional domains. Based on articles published in peer-reviewed journals in English, this scoping review maps the development of CA in social work research. The review gives an overview of the institutional contexts, professional groups and client groups that have been investigated using CA methods, as well as how their interactional practices have been examined. We show contributions of CA to understanding social work in terms of specific interactional practices, how practitioners accomplish challenging institutional activities in interactions and how theories and ideals about interactions relate to social work practice. The review highlights research gaps concerning clients’ resources for pursuing agendas, embodied conduct in social work, contributions to the cumulative body of CA research and implications for practice. We discuss these findings in relation to CA as a relatively new approach in social work research and the challenges which CA may need to address to become a more integrated part of social work research and practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.