On Interruptions in Doctor–Patient Interactions: Who Is the Stranger Here?

Abstract

Even though interruptions in various areas of spoken interaction have been the focus of research which deals with such issues as power and dominance, more recently, this focus seems to have been on the many functions they can hold. One research area in which interruptions may be given less attention is that of doctor-patient interactions (see, for example, Menz & Al-Roubaie 2008). This paper investigates the issue of interruptions in medical interviews. From a corpus of 26 medical interviews, one was selected for a pilot qualitative context-bound analysis meant to inform the following analysis of the whole corpus at later stages of the study. The findings of the analysis demonstrate that it seems possible to use the existing analytical framework for the identification of types of interruptions characteristic of medical interviews in the Romanian context.

Keywords

• doctor-patient interaction
• interruption
• medical interview
• supportive
• non-supportive interruptions
• failed attempts at interruption