Naeslund2017

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Naeslund2017
BibType ARTICLE
Key Naeslund2017
Author(s) Shirley Näslund
Title Age ascription as a resource and a source of resistance: an interactional study of health professionals' castings of patients into the category ‘old’
Editor(s)
Tag(s) Assertive communication, Healthcare, age, EMCA, ascription
Publisher
Year 2017
Language English
City
Month
Journal Journal of Aging Studies
Volume 41
Number
Pages 28-35
URL Link
DOI 10.1016/j.jaging.2017.03.001
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This case study aims to give an understanding of what actions health professionals' castings of patients into the category ‘old’ perform on a medical and social level as well as what actions patients' interactional management of these castings perform. Particularly, this study aims to bring to the fore the negotiability of health professionals' perspectivating age ascriptions. This is done with the conversation analytic method (CA) according to which altercasting is a mutual construction performed turn by turn and shaped by the reactions of the interlocutor who can approve, resist, or modify the identity in question. The data are drawn from two Swedish television documentaries on health encounters. Three major findings are presented. Firstly, the castings of the patients into the category ‘old’ are in several cases embedded in metaphors that either position the patient's body in the role of a victim of old age or in the role of a machine to routinely check. Secondly, the castings with a fateful approach to old age are ambivalent; whereas they serve as resources for the health professionals' normalizing of medical projects and perspectives, they can constitute sources of problems for the patients' doctorability and/or agency. Thirdly, the health professionals' perspectivating age ascriptions are negotiable; their design facilitates resistance to them, and the patients accept, modify, interrupt or reverse them.

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