Book Title

The Discourse of Comfort in Chinese Online Medical Consultations

Editor

Ying Jin (Department of English and Communication)

Publisher

Routledge

Year of Publication

2025

ISBN

9781003493327

Introduction

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. 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.

Content

Chapter 1 Introduction: Towards an interactional understanding of comforting and online healthcare
Chapter 2 Preliminaries and methodology
Chapter 3 “This is quite common”: Normalizing and reassuring
Chapter 4 Showing compassion
Chapter 5 Rendering bad news bivalent
Chapter 6 Resistance to comfort and its management
Chapter 7 Summary, emergent themes, and future directions

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