Communication in Pediatric Healthcare: A State-of-the-Art Literature Review of Conversation-Analytic Research

ABSTRACT

Communication is central to pediatric care. Conversation analytic (CA) studies of recorded naturally occurring pediatric interactions contribute distinctive understandings; however, to date there has been no detailed review of CA’s unique contributions. We searched Medline, PsychINFO, Sciencedirect, Google Scholar, and the EM/CA Wiki database, identifying 74 empirical articles across diverse areas of pediatrics. Our state-of-the-art review highlights CA of clinician and caregiver conversations about a child patient, in addition to those involving the child. The findings have the potential to enhance clinical practice by illuminating how healthcare tasks are practically accomplished and enrich our knowledge of children’s participation in consultations by revealing the mechanisms that constrain and enable their involvement. We call for better synthesis of findings with broader CA literature (e.g., nonclinical child interactions, adult triadic clinical encounters, and fundamental knowledge of social interaction). We appeal for increased support for scholarly work in non-Western settings, and emphasize scope for applied initiatives. The data reported are in multiple languages.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank scholars in the field for their collegiality in sharing their work with us, not all of which was possible to include within the scope of the article but which nonetheless contributes to the thriving and growing analysis of communication in paediatric care. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers and the editorial team for insightful comments that improved earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2024.2305046.

Notes

¹ http://emcawiki.net/EMCA_bibliography_database.