Using Formulations and Gaze to Encourage Parents to Talk About Their and Their Children's Health and Well-Being

Abstract

In preventive health-care settings, professionals need to encourage clients to talk about their problems before they become critical. We use multimodal conversation analysis to demonstrate how public health nurses encourage parents to elaborate on their problems in a sample of preventive maternity and child health (MCH) clinics in Finland. The nurses topicalize the problem-relevant aspects of the parents’ problem-indicative talk by issuing a formulation of what the parent has just said (that is, by redescribing it in problem-related terms). This verbal practice is synchronized with a visual one—the nurse issues the formulation, receives the parent's response, and then gazes directly at them. This has the effect of prompting the parent to take up the problem and talk about it. We discuss the findings in relation to the institutional tasks in MCH care and to the role of gaze in constituting actions, such as formulations. Data are in Finnish with English translation.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Riikka Homanen, Pirjo Lindfors, and Aku Kallio for their collaboration in the research project and Elina Weiste for her valuable comments on the analyses. We also thank participants in the seminars and data sessions at University of Tampere and University of Helsinki during 2011–2013.

Notes

¹Two families with a child were video-recorded twice.

²The following abbreviations are used to refer to participants in the extracts: N = nurse, M = mother, F = father, and B = baby. The speaker's gaze direction is marked above the line in italics and the recipient's below. The lines (---) indicate continuous gaze direction. Quick shifts in gaze direction are indicated only by shifts in target, and slow shifts (head movements) with dots ( … ). (See Goodwin, 1981.)

³In Finnish, the particle nii can be used in various contexts in which it has different meanings. In some cases, it can be translated as “yeah”/“yes”. However, the particle can also be used as a response particle that marks affiliation (Sorjonen, 2001, p. 164). As in these cases there is not an equivalent translation for the particle, it has been left without a translation and we explain the meaning in the text.