Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

486 Chapter 17
P: My daughter’s birthday in Princeton was the uh first, and I called her up and
talked with her. I don’t know what time it’ll cost me, but then, my telephone
is my only connection.
Waitzkin et al. comment:
At no other time in the encounter does the patient refer to her own family, nor
does the doctor ask. The patient does her best to maintain contact, even though
she does not mention anything that she receives in the way of day-to-day support.
Compounding these problems of social support and incipient isolation, the
patient recently has moved from a home that she occupied for 59 years.
(ibid.:330–331)
When they get through presenting their running commentary on the
encounter, Waitzkin et al. interpret the discourse:
This encounter shows structural elements that appear beneath the surface details
of patient-doctor communication. . . . Contextual issues affecting the patient
include social isolation; loss of home, possessions, family, and community; limited
resources to preserve independent function; financial insecurity; and physical
deterioration associated with the process of dying. . . . After the medical encounter,
the patient returns to the same contextual problems that trouble her, consenting
to social conditions that confront the elderly in this society.
That such structural features should characterize an encounter like this one
becomes rather disconcerting, since the communication otherwise seems so
admirable. . . . The doctor manifests patience and compassion as he encourages
a wide-ranging discussion of socioemotional concerns that extend far beyond the
technical details of the patient’s physical disorders. Yet the discourse does nothing
to improve the most troubling features of the patient’s situation. To expect
differently would require redefining much of what medicine aims to do.
(ibid.:335–336)
Waitzkin et al. make clear that alternative readings of the same passage are
possible and advocate, as part of their method, the systematic archiving, in
publicly available places, of texts on which analysis is conducted. When the
project was over, Waitzkin filed the transcripts with University Microfilms
International so that other researchers could use the data for later analysis.
Conversation Analysis
If you listen carefully to ordinary conversations between equals, you’ll hear
a lot of sentence fragments, false starts, interruptions, overlaps (simultaneous
speech), and repeating of words and phrases. It may sound messy at first, but