Kevin Harvey

Health communication and adolescents: what do their emails tell us?

BACKGROUND It is widely known that barriers exist in communication between adolescents and health professionals. However, little is known about the actual language used by young people articulating such difficulties and whether email might allow them to overcome these problems. OBJECTIVES The aims of this study were to investigate concerns and difficulties relating to communication among adolescents seeking online health advice. METHODS The study design was a corpus linguistic analysis of a million-word adolescent health email database based on 62 794 emails from young people requesting health advice from a prominent UK-hosted and doctor-led website. RESULTS Young people reported various concerns about their health. They described numerous difficulties in disclosing such concerns to other people, in particular to parents and doctors. However, they readily expressed their concerns by email, displaying elevated levels of directness, particularly in relation to potentially sensitive or embarrassing topics. CONCLUSION Email has the potential to facilitate and supplement face-to-face consultations with health professionals. Increased adoption of email by health providers may be an efficient means of engaging with a generation often reluctant to access more traditional health care services and thus encourage them to enter the primary care setting more readily.

The Language of Compassion in Acute Mental Health Care

In this article we examine the language of compassion in acute mental health care in the United Kingdom. Compassion is commonly defined as being sensitive to the suffering of others and showing a commitment to relieve it, yet we know little about how this is demonstrated in health professional language and how it is situated in the context of acute mental health care services. We report on a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 20 acute mental health practitioner interview narratives about compassion and find a striking depletion in the use of “compassionate mentality” words, despite the topic focus. The language used by these practitioners placed more emphasis on time pressures, care processes, and organizational tensions in a way that might compromise best practice and point to the emergence of a “production-line mentality.”

Caught Between Professional Requirements and Interpersonal Needs: Vague Language in Healthcare Contexts

Defining VL is a problematic endeavour, and VL is itself, arguably, a vague concept. A wide range of definitions exists, and the lexico-grammatical realizations and categories associated with VL vary considerably between researchers. For the purpose of this study, we adopt Channell’s (1994) framework for describing and analysing VL, since it provides a systematic and rigorous description of VL used in real and varied contexts of communication, detailing how it is employed by real speakers and writers. Her framework has been applied effectively to a variety of contexts of interaction, ranging from studies into intercultural communication (Drave 2000) to adolescent talk (Stenstrom and Hasund 2002).

Medicalisation, pharmaceutical promotion and the Internet: a critical multimodal discourse analysis of hair loss websites

This study conducts a critical multimodal discourse analysis of commercial hair loss websites. Specifically, I focus on eight sites which provide information about and promote the pharmaceutical hair loss treatment Propecia, a widely available medication marketed to treat male pattern baldness. I identify four salient discursive strategies through which the websites depict male hair loss and the Propecia treatment, namely (1) representing the balding man as type and outcast, (2) promoting the attractiveness and self-assurance of the hirsute man, (3) situating male hair loss in a scientific discourse and (4) encouraging consumers to self-evaluate their hair loss. By inducing insecurities in men experiencing hair loss and encouraging them to embrace pharmaceutical remedies as a viable response to male pattern balding, these discursive-semiotic strategies help to reproduce the contemporary sociocultural practice of medicalisation, the phenomenon whereby the natural processes of life are treated as medical problems. The findings of this study suggest that these promotional discourses play a role in transforming ordinary, benign ailments into illnesses, reconfiguring them as treatable disorders for commercial gain.

Health Communication and Corpus Linguistics: Using Corpus Tools to Analyse Eating Disorder Discourse Online

This chapter aims to show readers how corpus linguistics techniques can be used to analyse an important domain of discourse: health communication — and in particular online discourse relating to the increasing problem of eating disorders. Using a number of staple corpus techniques (keyword, collocation and concordance analyses) we identify and describe the salient linguistic features through which people express their concerns about eating disorders and therewith negotiate anorexic identities. In the process we reveal how quantitatively dominant lexical signatures identified by corpus-driven analysis can also be shown to be qualitatively dominant by closer discourse analysis. Furthermore, our study provides insight into the personal experiences of people with eating disorders, and thus demonstrates the utility of a corpus approach for making sense of complex psychological health concerns.

Just plain Wronga? A multimodal critical analysis of online payday loan discourse

ABSTRACT Payday loans constitute one of the most rapidly expanding and controversial forms of consumer lending today. Payday lending – the selling of high-interest, short-term credit – has thrived following the decline of the traditional high street banking system and the reluctance of many mainstream credit services, following the 2007/2008 Global Financial Crisis, to lend to low-income earners. This study examines the website of the industry leader in the UK, Wonga, a payday lender which recently rebranded and relaunched itself (in 2015) after being embroiled in a series of financial scandals. Our analysis centres on the new Wonga website, the gateway to its financial services, and identifies three inter-related discursive strategies through which the lender, in the wake of its financial misconduct, seeks to present itself as a reputable financial service provider, namely by (1) constructing the empowered and responsible borrower, (2) destigmatising both its service provision and its prospective customers, the payday borrower, and (3) minimising the consequences and risks associated with payday borrowing. Collectively, these strategies constitute an artful response by Wonga to the changing legislative and socioeconomic contexts in which it and other payday lenders now operate, permitting it to continue marketing and selling its high-interest rate financial services.

Language and Love

Social networking sites (SNS) provide adolescents with opportunities for content generation on a wide range of social issues, providing unique insight into the psychosocial development of adolescence. We explored SNS webpages viewed by a random sample of adolescents during the initial uptake of SNS use (2005) to describe their general language use. Adolescents aged 14 to 17 with home Internet access were recruited using list-assisted random digit dialing methods. All SNS (MySpace) webpages viewed by participants were captured, and a large, structured set of texts (text corpus) was created from the profiles and message boards therein. Using concordance software, word frequency and keyword associations were analyzed. The 346 participants viewed approximately 28,000 MySpace pages, yielding a 1,147,432-word text corpus. Profile sections presented information about the content creator, while message boards focused more on short conversations with recipients. The most common content word was the term love. Profile owners would profess their love for activities, such as dancing, partying, or shopping, followed by their love for family, friends, and significant others. SNS offer teens an opportunity to describe and share feelings about people, places, and things connected to a range of activities and social contacts within their online and offline environments. Better understanding of SNS can offer strategies to adolescents and health care providers for insight into what connects young people in a community.

“Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press

ABSTRACT A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.

Emotional distress with dementia: A systematic review using corpus-based analysis and meta-ethnography

More understanding is needed about the emotional experiences of dementia from the perspective of the individual. This understanding can then inform the provision of health care to meet individual needs. This systematic review aimed to present all available descriptions of emotional distress and explanations for emotional distress experienced by individuals with dementia, articulated personally and by others.

The discourse of alternative credit : a multimodal critical examination of the Cash Converters mobile app

Following the 2007/2008 Global Financial Crisis, recent times have seen the continuing rise of high interest, so-called fringe economy financial services, including payday lenders, cheque cashing services and pawnbrokers. In this chapter, Brookes and Harvey critically examine the mobile app of the world’s largest pawnbroker, Cash Converters, exposing the subtle but powerful multi-semiotic techniques through which this fringe economy service provider promotes its high interest services to the credit poor. All told, their analysis emphasises the utility of a critical multimodal approach for exposing how the discourse surrounding fringe economy services targets the needy and vulnerable.