Genetic counselling as a medical encounter is characterised by the centrality of the provision of information. Much of the counselling session is filled by information delivery about the symptoms, the prognosis and the transmission of the disease, the risks involved and the possibilities for genetic testing. The present paper is a study of how information is delivered in actual genetic counselling sessions. The data consist of 10 video-recorded sessions from a genetics clinic in Finland, and the methodology is based on conversation analysis. The paper focuses on the doctor's talk in a specific interactional context, the slot after a candidate understanding by a client. The analysis shows that the doctors have two basic orientations: they work towards securing correct understanding and they display being attuned to what the information means to the clients, particularly to whether it is positive or negative to them. The latter orientation is related to what has been called 'the benign order of everyday life' (Maynard 2003). The findings in the paper offer a possibility for a discussion about the principles and practices of genetic counselling.
The author analyzes how participants of Seventh-Day Adventist Bible study describe their experience as similar to that of the characters of the Bible stories they are reading. In conversation analytical studies of second stories, it has been shown how the teller of the second story achieves a similarity between her/his experience and that described in the first story. In Bible study, similarity of experiences is also achieved, but the situation is more complex, since similarity must be achieved with a written story. The article shows how the Bible study participants first work with the Bible story so as to find something that can be applied to their own lives. Then the teacher of the Bible study asks a question about the experiences of the participants on the basis of this work. The respondents then describe similar experiences to those in the Bible story. The experiences they describe are categorical, shareable religious experiences. The teachers comment on the answers and display their orientation to and evaluate the shareability of the experiences. The methodology is based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis, and the data consists of audio-taped Bible study interactions in two SeventhDay Adventist churches in Finland.
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