2009. After grad school, I answered a fascinating ad from a group at Tufts that was doing very close language analysis of how patients and providers communicate. We listened to medical visits, mostly in HIV care, and coded every speech act! I loved so many things about the job. One, I had just been getting into Nonviolent Communication, but was feeling frustrated because spoken language moves so quickly. Here was an opportunity to work with recorded spoken language, and be able to pause it and analyze it, read it, code it, and really zoom in on how it functioned. We would have long talks about empathy and motivation, it was a lovely project.
Eventually the Principle Investigator moved to Brown, and I drove back and forth for a while and worked some at home, but it was just too far away for me. Still, I'll always be grateful for this amazing phase of my career where conversations were frozen and I could take my time thinking about them.
Here are two papers that give you an idea of the work we did:
Treatment acceptance and adherence in HIV disease: patient identity and the perceived impact of physician-patient communication, 2012
Problems and processes in medical encounters: The cases method of dialogue analysis, 2013
And here's a paper where I did interviews with people looking into how they understand / conceptualize their health, HIV, and treatment.
