Discourse of Comfort in Chinese Online Medical Consultations

<p>This book integrates perspectives from conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology to shed light on doctor-patient communication in asynchronous web-based interactions through the lens of the discourse of comfort. While previous research has been done in this space on face-to-face encounters this book seeks to bring further attention to comfort in online text interactions between doctors and patients examining its capacity to convey emotional support encourage “troubles-telling and facilitate problem solving in medical encounters. A discursive psychology approach provides a complementary perspective to ethnomethodology and CA frameworks applied to an extensive corpus with data scraping in Python. While Chinese data is featured this integrated approach allows for a nuanced view of the differences between spoken and online interactions as well as the role of technology in the organization of talk and doctor-patient communication more broadly.</p><p>This book will be valuable reading for students and scholars interested in talk-in-interaction CA health communication language and health pragmatics and social psychology.</p>