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Article published In: Narratives as Social Practice in Organisational Contexts
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop, Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr
[Narrative Inquiry 32:1] 2022
► pp. 36–65

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Narrative accounts and their influence on treatment recommendations in medical interviews

 | Emory University
Published online: 27 October 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20028.fio
Abstract
Previous research exploring the use of narratives in medical interviews has primarily examined the history-taking phase to illustrate the ways in which physicians and patients discursively collaborate to organize and interpret patients’ illness experiences (Eggly, S. (2002). Physician-patient co-construction of illness narratives in the medical interview. Health Communication, 14(3), 339–360. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Halkowski, T. (2006). Realizing the illness: Patients’ narratives of symptom discover. In J. Heritage, & D. W. Maynard (Eds.), Communication in medical care: Interaction between primary care physicians and patients (pp. 86–114). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Stivers, T., & Heritage, J. (2001). Breaking the sequential mold: Answering ‘more than the question’ during comprehensive history taking. Text, 21(1–2), 151–185.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In this paper, the scope will be expanded to demonstrate that narrative accounts are interwoven and unfold across various phases of the medical interview, not only the history-taking phase, and are utilized in a variety of ways to collaboratively accomplish specific social practices. A narrative as talk-in-interaction approach is used to examine narrative accounts using audio-recordings of naturally occurring medical interview data (US, American English). This paper examines the ways in which narratives are locally occasioned to do a variety of things (e.g., raise difficult topics, actively resist treatment, reinforce identities), including influencing the treatment decision making process.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • Narrative medicine
    • Narratives in physician-patient interactions
    • Intertextuality and repetition
  • Methodological approach
    • Narrative as talk-in-interaction
  • Data
  • Analysis
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (76)
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