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The experience of pain is one of
the most important symptoms of illness. It is, therefore, not
surprising that from a medical perspective numerous taxonomies
of pain representations are available which have resulted in
detailed pain questionnaires. It is astonishing, however, that
from a linguistic / discourse-analytic point of view hardly any
investigations are to be found, al-though doctor-patient
communication has been a central focus of discourse-analytic
research for decades. In order to mitigate past research
deficits three primary aspects are to be exam-ined in this
project:
First, the project will develop an empirically founded
systematic description of the procedures which German-speaking
humans actually use in order to describe pain of different kinds
and quality. Both, lexicon, metaphors, metonymy as well as the
use of paraphrases, reformulations, and presentation strategies
are of interest in this connection.
Secondly, the issue will be addressed, whether the forms of
women's pain descriptions differ from those by men.
Gender-specific differences might have effects on the diagnosis,
as the results of a discourse-analytic pilot project (Menz et
al. 2002) indicate.
Thirdly, a matter of special relevance is the question how the
pain representations of the pa-tients are transferred into the
institutional context. Which forms of the pain representation do
experience which transformations and categorisations? This
aspect is particularly important, since the idio-syncratic pain
perception of individual patients has to be communicated here
and must be transformed to a specific form of medical treatment.
The study will be carried out within the framework of the Vienna
school of critical discourse analysis and a medical-semiotic
framework. It will be based on the following data sources:
- Pain descriptions by female and male patients of an internal
ward (tape-recorded and transcribed for the most part already)
- Tape-recordings in two different outpatient pain clinics of
the AKH (headache outpatient clinic of the University Clinic of
Neurology; outpatient clinic of the Dept. of Physical Medicine
and Rehabilitation)
- Tape-recordings in two neurological wards of the University
Clinic of Neurology
- interviews with selected patients and doctors in attendance
Apart from the examination of the research questions a primary
goal of the planned study is to reach a better fitting between
authentic, oral talk-in-interaction of the descriptions of pain
with existing medical taxonomies and classifications. |
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supported by:
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