DISCOURSE OF POWER FROM THE ASPECT OF INTERRUPTION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.38003/zrffs.14.8
Danka Sinadinović, Univerzitet u Beogradu, Medicinski fakultet, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3643-5917
Abstract:
The discourse of medical encounters is an excellent example of both institutional
talk and the discourse of power and its prominent features can be analysed from
various aspects. This paper deals with interruption as an important characteristic of
both doctor-patient communication and institutional talk in general. The research
is focused on comparing the ways doctors and patients interrupt each other and the
amount of power they need for this. First, some previous research in this field has
been reviewed – it is discussed how interruptions are different from overlaps, how
typical it is for patients to interrupt their doctors, how and why doctors and patients
interrupt each other and whether they have equal rights when it comes to interrupting
their interlocutors. As we aimed at checking these results and investigating if, how
and when patients interrupted their doctors, a corpus of 37 recordings made in a
tertiary referral hospital in Belgrade, Serbia, in the department of pulmonology, has
been analysed. Examples of interruptions by doctors and patients were analysed
according to the principles of conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis.
The obtained results confirmed an ever-present asymmetry in doctor-patient
communication, although it was not as conspicuous as it had been stated in some
previous research. Finally, the difference between the ways in which doctors and
patients interrupt each other and the reasons behind these interruptions were
emphasized.
Key words:
conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, discourse of power,
doctor-patient communication, institutional talk, interruption, medical encounter
