Treating Distressed Animals as Participants: I Know Responses in Veterinarians’ Pet-Directed Talk

Abstract

This article reports on video analyses of 110 veterinary appointments in which pet-directed I know receipts were uttered by 15 veterinarians as responses to companion animals’ vocal and visible signals of distress. Patients’ distress was typically occasioned by medical activities constituting the appointment. The dual functions of I know as a claim of (a) prior knowledge of animals’ experiences and (b) shared feelings and affiliation with animals’ experiences made it an interactional resource for addressing client anxiety arising from the disalignment of animal patients with the goals of the appointment. Analysis of prosody, prefacing, the presence or absence of repeats, and postpositioned components demonstrated the flexibility of the I know receipt in modulating veterinarians’ stances toward their patients’ expressions of distress. Findings are discussed in relation to studies on the management of patient distress and pain in pediatric procedures and to previous research on clinician–patient empathy in veterinary medicine. Data are in Canadian English.

We acknowledge the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice on this article. Early versions were presented in July 2010 at the meeting of the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, Mannheim, Germany; in October 2010 at a colloquium sponsored by the Center for Language, Interaction and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles, California; and in November 2010 at the meeting of the International Conference on Communication in Veterinary Medicine, Napa, California. The authors thank audience members and John Heritage for their insightful comments, and Shannon Cunningham and Hannah Wheat for their transcription skills and engaging discussions about empathy.

Notes

2. ¹This number underestimates the actual frequency of I know receipts considerably. Many excluded sequences, involving interactions on the floor of the examining room or in corners where animals had fled, occurred off camera or were not otherwise entirely visible (e.g., in some segments, animals’ embodied activities were occluded by veterinarians’ or clients’ bodies). We also excluded the many I know receipts used by veterinary technicians from whom we did not have consent to include their talk in the study.

3. ²Two of the 17 veterinarians who engaged in pet-directed talk in their appointments did not use I know receipts.

4. ³I know can have an exclusive blocking function. Citing Schegloff (1968) on summons-answer sequences, Sidnell (2010) described “I know, take out the trash” (p. 101) as a blocking response to a summons that is a pre-sequence to a request; the recipient’s prior knowledge of the content of that impending request blocks it as unnecessary.

5. ⁴We thank Jonathan Potter for this suggestion.

6. ⁵A preliminary inspection was made of videotaped medical appointments involving pediatricians conducting ear examinations on infants and young children. Practitioners were observed to use I know tokens to receipt patients’ distress during ear examinations (T. Stivers, personal communication, October 28, 2010). See Stivers and Majid (2007) for an example of previous research on physician–patient interactions using these data.

7. ⁶This would involve analysis of medical interactions with patients presenting with no verbal expressive language skills, rather than with limited expressive language skills as in much of the current research (see Antaki & Wilkinson, 2013).

8. ⁷For example, French has two verbs with different meanings and uses, connaître and savoire, that represent translations of the English verb to know.