Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings - Jan-Ola Östman

Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings - Jan-Ola Östman

Chapter 4: Negotiating parental/familial responsibility in genetic counselling

Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings - Jan-Ola Östman

Gøril Thomassen Hammerstad [+-]
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
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I am a Full professor in Applied Linguistics and Professional Discourse Studies, with a specialization in Health Communication. My main research areas are discourse analysis in institutional and professional domains. Based on my work on Professional Discourse Studies in various healthcare and medical settings I have engaged with how concepts like co-construction, communicative activity type, discursive power, and interactional management can be employed to understand patient participation and have practical implications for user involvement.
Srikant Sarangi [+-]
Aalborg University
Srikant Sarangi is Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University, Wales, UK (www.cf.ac.uk/encap/research/hcrc). He is also Professor in Language and Communication at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway; Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Aalborg University, Denmark; and Honorary Professor at the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests are in discourse analysis and applied linguistics; language and identity in public life and institutional/professional communication studies (e.g., healthcare, social welfare, bureaucracy, education etc.). He has held several project grants (Funding bodies include The Wellcome Trust, The Leverhulme Trust, ESRC) to study various aspects of health communication, e.g., genetic counselling, HIV/AIDS and telemedicine. The other areas of healthcare research include communication in primary care, palliative care, with particular reference to assessment of consulting and communication skills. He is author and editor of 12 books, 5 journal special issues and has published nearly 200 journal articles and book chapters. He is the founding editor of Communication & Medicine, editor of TEXT & TALK: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies (formerly TEXT) as well as co-editor (with C. N. Candlin) of Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. He is also general editor (with C. N. Candlin) of three book series[es]: Studies in Applied Linguistics; Studies in Language and Communication; and Studies in Communication in Organisations and Professions. He serves as an editorial board member for other journals and book series[es], and as a consulting advisor at many national and international levels. His involvement in professional societies include membership of the Executive Committee of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL, 1997-2002) and Member-at-Large of the Executive Board of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA, 1999-2002). He is also the founder of the annual interdisciplinary conference series, Communication, Medicine and Ethics (COMET) and Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (ALAPP). Over the last ten years, he has held visiting academic attachments in many parts of the world.
John-Arne Skolbekken [+-]
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
John-Arne Skolbekken has a PhD in health science and is professor in the Department of Social Work and Health Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research interests are within modern medical risk discourse, including risk communication in such settings as advertisements for pharmaceutical products, genetic counselling and various forms of medical screening. A common theme in his research is the ethical implications of risk communication.

Description

The notion of responsibility is central in healthcare encounters, especially when it involves decisions about others, e.g., parents making decisions for children’s wellbeing. In the context of genetic counselling, given the familial basis of genetic disorders, decisions surrounding offer/uptake of genetic testing to determine the risk status of children become salient. Previous studies have shown that both genetic counsellors and parents routinely orient to others’ perspectives. Extending Pilnick’s (2001) finding that genetic counsellors allude to ‘what other people do’, Sarangi’s (2010) proposal which distinguishes between ‘family-others’ and ‘general-others’ vis-à-vis role-responsibility offers a useful framework to examine how parental/familial responsibility is contingently negotiated between genetic counsellors and parents. The data for the present study consist of 20 genetic counselling sessions within a hospital department of medical genetics in Norway. The parents are either affected by cancer or at a high risk of inheriting cancer because of family history. Using discourse analysis we demonstrate how parental responsibility is framed and responded to differentially to cover genetic risk assessment, the testing process and the dissemination of test results. Our findings indicate that counsellors tend to be more directive about the process of decision making, which may amount to shifting attention from at-risk children to the parents themselves. We link our findings to the professional ethos of (non)directiveness in genetic counselling.

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Citation

Thomassen, Gøril; Sarangi, Srikant; Skolbekken, John-Arne . Chapter 4: Negotiating parental/familial responsibility in genetic counselling. Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 67-95 Apr 2016. ISBN 9781845539153. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=26840. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.26840. Apr 2016

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