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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

Narrative accounts and their influence on treatment recommendations in medical interviews

| Emory University

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, 2002; Halkowski, 2006; Stivers & Heritage, 2001). 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.

Keywords: narratives, accounts, narrative as talk-in-interaction, physician-patient interactions, treatment recommendations, narrative medicine, healthcare communication 
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
Published online: 27 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20028.fio
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