Research Projects

Although patients and parents often readily accept their clinician's treatment recommendations, sometimes this is not the case. This project is focused on situations where patients are in conflict with their physicians, sometimes quite overtly but other times subtly. My interest is in the communication strategies that patients and families use to pressure physicians and then how physicians work to deflect this pressure or persuade them to follow their direction.  Drawing on a range of different data from general pediatrics, pediatric neurology, and internal medicine, I ask what strategies work and why. 

Although there is no doubt that conversation plays a paramount role in how close we become to someone, there are few ways of examining what the micro-level processses might be for becoming closer or more distant in a relationship. It is certainly not only about agreeing on everything all of the time.  Sometimes disagreement is actually important. In this project I examine alignment, affiliation, and agency as they are balanced moment to moment in question-answer sequences. Check out my book on this topic:  The Book of Answers: Alignment, Autonomy, and Affiliation in Social Interaction.

When we talk with each other in everyday conversation, we do all sorts of social actions: We greet, invite, accept, propose, complain, agree, disagree, and compliment. Together  with Giovanni Rossi and Andrew Chalfoun, I ask who performs which social actions in which contexts and how we make clear which action we are doing at any given moment. These studies take up the challenge of figuring out what sorts of rights and obligations are associated with actions as well as how we remediate problems and breaches of conduct. We have been focusing on major requests including how they are designed and negotiated. 

Over dinner, Gus Cooney asked what I thought makes conversation great. I didn't have an answer, and that bothered me. This sparked a collaboration seeking to understand the kinds of interaction practices that are associated with rating a conversation with a stranger as good, bad, or meh. We are working with with Giovanni Rossi, Andrew Chalfoun, and Amanda Morris and asking whether there are ways of conversing and practices in talk that are associated with participants feeling that their conversation partner was a good conversationalist and that the conversation was particularly enjoyable.