VanderLaaken2020

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VanderLaaken2020
BibType ARTICLE
Key VanderLaaken2020
Author(s) Manon van der Laaken, Anne Bannink
Title Openings in follow-up cancer consultations: The ‘How are you?’ question revisited
Editor(s)
Tag(s) discourse, discourse analysis, doctor-patient interaction, follow-up cancer consultation, ‘how are you’ questions, opening questions, The Netherlands
Publisher
Year 2020
Language English
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Month
Journal Discourse Studies
Volume 22
Number 2
Pages 205–220
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/1461445619893793
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
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Series
Howpublished
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Abstract

The standard process for starting anamnesis in the follow-up cancer consultation is for the doctor to ask a ‘How are you?’ question. This question gives the patient the opportunity to give a gloss of their general condition and offer the first topic of discussion. Findings in earlier analyses of US and UK data in a broad array of medical contexts show that the question is ambiguous and hence patients may interpret it as social rather than medical. A discourse analysis of a corpus of 28 video-taped consultations shows that the ‘How are you?’ question in the context of Dutch follow-up cancer consultations is consistently interpreted by both doctor and patients as a holistic medical question, making relevant a – frequently complex and nuanced – medically oriented response. We suggest that this difference may have to do with the interactional norms of hospital visits in the Netherlands, and with the specific contextual parameters of return visits, more specifically with follow-up cancer consultations, which affect the way the HAY question is placed, intended and understood.

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