Healthcare professionals' online use of violence metaphors for care at the end of life in the US: a corpus-based comparison with the UK

Abstract

The use of Violence metaphors in healthcare has long been criticised as detrimental to patients. Recent work Semino et al., 2015) has combined qualitative analysis with corpus-based quantitative methods to analyse the frequency and variety of Violence metaphors in the language of UK-based patients, family carers, and healthcare professionals talking about cancer and/or end-of-life care. A new, 250,324-word corpus of US health professionals' online discourse has been collected to add a contrastive, crosscultural element to the study of metaphors in end-of-life care. In this work, we move towards a replicable method for comparing frequency and type of Violence metaphors in UK and US contexts by making use of both search-and-recall and key semantic tag analysis in the corpus query tool Wmatrix. First, we discuss the most overused and underused semantic domains in the US corpus as compared with the pre-existing UK corpus of online healthcare professional discourse. Second, we show that there are no notable frequency differences in the occurrence of Violence metaphors in the two corpora, but we point out some differences in the topics that these metaphors are used to discuss. Third, we introduce a novel framework for analysing agency in Violence metaphors and apply it to the US corpus. This reveals the variety of relationships, concerns and challenges that these metaphors can express. Throughout, we relate our findings to the different US and UK cultural and institutional contexts, and reflect on the methodological implications of our approach for corpus-based metaphor analysis.

GP perspectives on hospital discharge letters: an interview and focus group study

“…32 CL is a branch of linguistics that focuses on analysing patterns of co-occurrence and meanings in corpus data 33,34 ; its application can bring new insights to research questions. 35 CL has previously been demonstrated as useful for health-related research related to communication [36][37][38][39][40] and, therefore, was considered suitable for this study. CL techniques allowed pattern-identification of important content items (research question 1) and GP views on patients receiving letters (research question 2).…”

Adult patient perspectives on receiving hospital discharge letters: a corpus analysis of patient interviews

“…Corpus processing can reveal language patterns and commonalities as well as rare cases; neither of which are likely to be reliably available through manual searching or intuition alone [37][38][39]. CL has successfully been employed for health-focussed research [40][41][42][43][44][45].…”

Self- and Other-Dehumanization Processes in Health-Related Contexts: A Critical Review of the Literature

“…Around 18% of the studies drew upon psychosocial dehumanization theories, particularly the dual model of dehumanization Haslam, 2006;Martinez, 2014;, or the infrahumanization theory (Leyens, 2009;Pavon & Vaes, 2017;Vaes & Muratore, 2013), to analyze determinants and consequences of other-dehumanization. Discursive approaches were used to explore dehumanized representations or metaphors of the body in the press (Coveney, Nerlich, & Martin, 2009;Naslund, 2017;Potts & Semino, 2017) or in participants' discourses Dykes, 2005;Lauri, 2009;Schuster, Beune, & Stronks, 2011;Walker, 2012). Two studies used Social Representations Theory (Moscovici, 1984) to explore attitudes toward organ donation (Lauri, 2009) and health professionals' dehumanizing representations about people who are transgender (Lefkowitz & Mannel, 2017; Table 3).…”

“…et al (2017),Andrew et al (2015Andrew et al ( , 2016,,Hallsworth et al et al (2016),Lauri (2009), Pavon andVaes (2017),,,Vaes and Muratore (2013) United Kingdom 813.6Calogero and Pina (2011),Chapman (1998),Coveney et al (2009),Dykes (2005),Lefkowitz and Mannel (2017), O'Brien et al (2008),Potts and Semino (2017), Walker (2012) United States 28 47.5 Anderson et al (2014), Aubrey and Hahn (2016), Cottingham et al (2014), Cox et al (2016), Grose and Gabe (2014), Hanna et al (2017), Harrel et al (2006), Impett et al (2006), Impett et al (2011), Johnston-Robledo et al (2007), Lebowitz and Ahn (2016), Liss and Erchull (2015), Martinez (2014), Melbye et al (2007), Mercurio and Landry (2008), Mercurio and Rima (2011), Miner-Rubino et al (2002), Miron et al (2017), Morris et al (2012), Muehlenkamp et al (2005), O'Hara et al (2014), Rubin and Steinberg (2011), Szymanski and Feltman (2014), Szymanski and Mikorski (2017), Tolman et al (2006), Vencill et al (2015), Webb et al (2017), Winter (2016) Other countries 11 18.6 Al-Ali et al (2013), Caesens et al (2017), Estrada-Mesa, Muñoz-Echavarría, and Cardona-Arias (2016), Monge-Rojas et al (2017), Montes (2008), Naslund (2017), Sakalaki et al (2017), Schuster et al (2011), Sveinsdottir (2017a, 2017b), Zhang et al (2017) Role on (de)humanization Actor 11 18.6 Estrada-Mesa et al (2016), Lauri (2009), Lebowitz and Ahn (2016), Lefkowitz and Mannel (2017), Martinez (2014), Miron et al (2017), Pavon and Vaes (2017), Piccoli et al (2017), Potts and Semino (2017), Trifiletti et al (2014), Vaes and Muratore (2013) Target 13 22 Adams et al (2017), Anderson et al (2014), Aubrey and Hahn (2016), Caesens et al (2017), Chapman (1998), Coveney et al (2009), Monge-Rojas et al (2017), Naslund (2017), Sakalaki et al (2017), Schuster et al (2011), Walker (2012), Webb et al (2017), Zhang et al (2017) -Ali et al (2013), Andrew et al (2015, 2016), Calogero and Pina (2011), Cohen et al (2018), Cottingham et al (2014), Cox et al (2016), Dakanalis et al (2016), Dykes (2005), Grose and Gabe (2014), Hallsworth, Wade, and Tiggemann (2005), Hanna et al (2017), Harrel et al (2006), Impett et al (2006), Impett et al (2011), Johnston-Robledo et al (2007), Liss and Erchull (2015), Melbye et al (2007), Mercurio and Landry (2008), Mercurio and Rima (2011), Montes (2008), Morris et al (2012), Muehlenkamp et al (2005), O'Brien et al (2008), O'Hara et al (2014), Rubin and Steinberg (2011), Sveinsdottir (2017a, 2017b), Szymanski and Feltman (2014), Szymanski and Mikorski (2017), Trifiletti et al (2014), Tiggemann and Slater (2015), Tolman et al (2006), Vencill et al (2015), Winter (2016) Health topics investigated Mental health 24 40.7 Adams et al (2017), Anderson et al (2014), Andrew et al (2015, 2016), Cox et al (2016), Dakanalis et al (2016), Hallsworth et al (2005), Impett et al (2011), Lebowitz and Ahn (2016), Liss and Erchull (2015), Martinez (2014), Mercurio and Landry (2008), Mercurio and Rima (2011), Miner-Rubino et al (2002), Miron et al (2017), Muehlenkamp et al (2005), O'Brien et al (2008), Pavon and Vaes (2017), Sakalaki et al (2017), Trifiletti et al (2014), Tiggemann and Slater (2015), Tolman et al (2006), Vaes a...…”