Argumentation and knowledge in antenatal care conversations.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kati Hannken-Illjes
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 500475473

Conversations in antenatal care consultations confront the participants with high ethical, emotional and judicial demands. The pregnant women are often insecure due to the bulk of information and expectations and doctors and midwives often act defensively, in order to avoid legal problems (see Dudenhausen 2008, 236). This stands in contrast to the necessity for the establishment of common ground in order to engage in joint – and informed – decision making. Hence, these conversations occur in a field of tension between insecurity and the need for security. The proposed project looks at argumentation as a central means to establish shared knowledge and studies the ways in which argumentation is constituted in the conversations. Different from other studies in doctor-patient conversations, which link studies of argumentation to concepts like joint decision making (Bickenbach 2014, Koerfer/Albus 2016, also Bergen et al. 2017), the proposed project takes argumentation (also) as way of establishing common ground. Hence, it focusses on the actualization and production of knowledge through the topoi employed; topoi understood here in the sense of a “communicative topic” (Knoblauch 2000). The project aims at reconstructing the status and function of argumentation as well as the argumentative establishment of knowledge. The goals of the project are threefold: First, to describe forms and functions of argumentation in medical consultations and to provide a model of argumentation for antenatal care conversations; second, to redirect the analyses to the practice of the field in the form of conversation-rhetorical concepts and third, to address fundamental issues of the role of argumentation in conversation. The project employs a conversation analytic perspective. It works with a corpus of 37 videotaped conversations of antenatal care consultations, that were collected in 2017 and 2018. The corpus has been completely annotated and transcribed in GAT 2 (basic transcription). The analyses and outcomes will be taken back to the field to the midwives for discussion and practical impact. The project follows an approach informed by speech communication in linking the analysis with practice in the sense of a grounded practical theory (Craig / Tracy 2014).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants