Crying wolf: A thematic and critical analysis of why individuals contest family members’ health complaints

ABSTRACT

We employed a critical approach to study uncertainty, identifying and historicizing the cultural discourses implicated in individuals' contestations of family members' health complaints. We drew upon the broader discourse typically termed the Enlightenment Subject, which imagines individuals as rational, self-regulating, self-knowing, and transcendental beings. Through interpretive thematic and critical analyses of interview data with 32 individuals, we identified 4 central contestations that reflect defining features of the Enlightenment Subject: You are not being rational; You are not trying; Your symptoms do not make sense; and You are not being yourself. This study has implications for interpersonal health communication theory connecting micro-processes to macro-level discourses, and for people as well as their family members coping with contested illness in their relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Family communication
• health
• credibility
• interviews
• critical theory

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the extremely helpful comments and suggestions they received from Editor Paul Schrodt and three anonymous reviewers. The authors would also like to thank Jessica Russell, Jessica Ford, Sarah Riforgiate, Lynsey Romo, and Jessica Hagman for their feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Charee M. Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She studies how individuals in personal and patient-provider relationships make sense of and communicate about illness, particularly under conditions of uncertainty, doubt, and stigma.

Christopher M. Duerringer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Employing a post-Marxist approach, his research examines the rhetorical processes by which economic, cultural, and political inequality is produced and maintained.

Notes

1 These prescriptions are also consistent with Foucault’s notion of biopower: the modern state does more than punish those who violate the law of the land, as it did in the medieval period; the powerful now exercise continual management over life, continually assessing and coaching the population in right action. Such management occurs at the level of official policy to be sure – in the census, in school lunch programs, and innumerable other points – but it also occurs in the beauty magazine, the talk radio call-in show, and within the institution of the family, where self-control and mastery are transmitted as norms.