Accounts on the Behalf of Patients during Geriatric Case Conferences

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The analysis of actors' accounts for their actions can reveal actors' understandings of local situations and of social standards. In this paper, I discuss some of the consequences of a variant of accounting for one's own actions, namely accounting for someone else's actions. Accounts given on someone else's behalf explain another person's conduct. Potentially, such accounts therefore undermine interlocutors as natural tellers of personal experience and one might expect this kind of account-giving to be a delicate matter. In this paper, however, I demonstrate that a powerful, supportive aspect of the practice is that in explaining a previous turn, it treats the original speaker as a sense-producing individual. Accounts made on behalf of patients during case conferences in the geriatric wards of Danish hospitals are investigated. Results show that such accounts simultaneously perform two kinds of actions: they seek to establish a local understanding of a prior utterance and, at the same time, they seek to establish understandings of the patients as sensible and autonomous human beings.
Original languageEnglish
JournalResearch on Language and Social Interaction
Volume42
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)231-248
Number of pages17
ISSN0835-1813
Publication statusPublished - 2009

ID: 10025478