Good Enough: Low-Grade Assessments in Caregiving Situations

Abstract

Drawing on prior research on how the sequential negotiation of upgrades and downgrades in the intensity of assessment terms are used to display agreement, make epistemic claims, or segment courses of action, this study explores low- and high-grade assessments in domiciliary elderly care in Denmark and Sweden. The data consist of video recordings of home visits where home help providers assist senior citizens with personal hygiene and domestic tasks. Low- and high-grade assessments are differentially distributed in this data. Low-grade assessments are routinely used to achieve closure of a practical task performed by the home helper on behalf of the senior citizen. High-grade assessments are rare, and they are specifically not used in sequences that target the services rendered by the home helper. Our analysis of assessments in sequences that achieve task closure reveals an interactional metric where “good enough” rather than excellent (or awful) is oriented to as the benchmark for evaluation of task outcome. This finding contrasts with prior research on ordinary conversation, which has shown that assessments tend to be upgraded in intensity over the course of the sequence.

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, Helsinki, May, 2006. We would like to thank Lorenza Mondada and two reviewers for their insightful comments. We are also grateful to Anders Liljenbring for editing the pictures from the home help visits. The study is one of several investigations in the project Language and Social Action: A Comparative Study of Affiliation and Disaffiliation across National Communities and Institutional Contexts (financed by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research, Dnr 0220-0883, and the Swedish Research Council, Dnr 421-2002-6941 and Dnr 412-2002-1056).

¹The turn-initial affirmative token in line 4 supports the claim that E's assessment is produced in agreement with J's second assessment in line 3.

²The adverb, altså in itself works as an intensifier. It is, however not as strong as rigtigt but corresponds approximately to an emphatic stress on the actual assessment godt (“good”) in English.

³From both cultural and linguistic perspectives, Danish and Swedish are close to identical (Vikør, 1993). Though there are small differences, for instance with regard to the form of the particle combination used for proposing completion of a task (så or sådan in Danish, sådär or sådärrå in Swedish), we have not found any differences between the two languages that would be consequential for our analysis and have thus chosen to treat Danish and Swedish as one database for the current study.

⁴The use of the past tense of the copula vart (“was”) in this question further emphasizes that something has been completed, just as the comparative form of the adjective bättre (“better”) indicates a process.

⁵As Svennevig has shown for Norwegian, which is closely related to both Danish and Swedish, answers to wh-questions are often initiated with the response tokens ja, jo, or nei (“yes,” “yes,” or “no”) in this language. Jo (“yes”) typically precedes answers to requests for evaluation (Svennevig, 2001), as it does in Example 13.

⁶As shown from the following example drawn from Lindström's studies of eller-inquiries (or-inquiries), jorå can project a downgraded response (Lindström, 1997, 1999). Per is calling his teammate Erik to arrange carpooling to an upcoming soccer game.

Per issues the question in line 01 in the “reason for call” slot. The wording of the question assumes that Eric has background knowledge of the event that Per only describes in terms of it taking place the next day. Per thus displays his own enthusiasm for the upcoming game and shows that he expects Eric to share his passion. The turn-initial jorå in line 02 projects Eric's downgraded response “sort of.”