Filtering by
- Member of: Neal, Tess
- Member of: Pannabecker, Virginia
- Member of: Torres, Peter Joseph
The escalation of the opioid epidemic in the United States has sparked sweeping legislation meant to regulate physicians' opioid prescribing practices. The demands of such policies force physicians to initiate discussions that could jeopardize the collaborative doctor- patient relationships necessary for curbing inappropriate opioid prescriptions. Drawing on sociopragmatics, this discourse analysis study of primary care interactions examines the face- saving linguistic features employed by physicians in negotiating the line between policy demands and maintaining collaborative relationships. The findings reveal several face-saving acts‚"pseudo requests, downtowners, broadening, redirection, tag questions, impersonalization, listing, and (negative) imagery‚"used by physicians when enacting the three most prominent policies: (1) monitoring opioid use, (2) prescribing anti-overdose medication, and (3) transitioning patients from opioids to alternative treatment. Informed by Goffman's concept of "face-work," this study provides evidence of the communicative burden placed on physicians implementing disagreeable opioid policies, as well as opening up discussions on how policymakers and medical institutions can support physicians in implementing opioid policies. Keywords: opioids, face-work, face threats, medical discourse, doctor-patient interaction, discourse analysis, sociopragmatics
In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor- patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic resources when describing chronic pain, narrating symptoms, and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions.
This is a dissertation of a current faculty member
The present study uses corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine the role of modality in policy verb phrases, using California opioid policies as a case study. By tracking the behavior of permissive and restrictive modals across time, this study highlights two potential discourse functions of modals in policy drafting: (i) to reflect the gravity of the issues on the ground, and (ii) to express permission and restriction by highlighting and deemphasizing a policy's suggestive intent, respectively. This study shows that the increased use of restrictive modality has significant positive correlations with California's worsening opioid crisis and its rising fatalities. A closer examination of state policy amendments reveals that altering policy modals has the potential to either broaden or limit the terms of existing policies. Informed by Van Dijk's “context models,” this study provides a cogent applied corpus linguistics framework for analyzing policy text and offers both political and linguistic perspectives into our understanding of modals and how communities address epidemics, respectively.
Patient-clinician interactions are central to technical and interpersonal processes of medical care. Video recordings of these interactions provide a rich source of data and a stable record that allows for repeated viewing and analysis. Collecting video recordings requires navigating ethical and feasibility constraints; further, realizing the potential of video requires specialized research skills. Interdisciplinary collaborations involving practitioners, medical educators, and social scientists are needed to provide the clinical perspectives, methodological expertise, and capacity needed to make collecting video worthwhile. Such collaboration ensures that research questions will be based on scholarship from the social sciences, resonate with practice, and produce results that fit educational needs. However, the literature lacks suggested practices for building and sustaining interdisciplinary research collaborations involving video data. In this paper, we provide concrete advice based on our experience collecting and analyzing a single set of video-recorded clinical encounters and non-video data, which have so far yielded nine distinct studies. We present the research process, timeline, and advice based on our experience with interdisciplinary collaboration. We found that integrating disciplines and traditions required patience, compromise, and mutual respect; learning from each other enhanced our enjoyment of the process, our productivity, and the clinical relevance of our research.
Objectives: This pilot study analyzes citation patterns of international health (IH) research. The authors hypothesize that researchers use journal articles more than other resources as other public health literature mapping projects have shown. This study's objective is to identify key journals in IH and unique or common citation patterns in IH in comparison to areas like infectious disease or environmental health.
Methods: The authors selected research articles published in January 2013 issues of four IH journals: Bulletin of the World Health Organization (BWHO), Health Policy and Planning (HPP), Lancet Infectious Diseases (LID), and the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition (JHPN). The criteria for journal selection were based on Core Public Health Journals Project version 2.0, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and Scopus. Data were collected by compiling all citations used by research articles. In addition to journals, books, and other published sources, this study identifies cited sources of gray literature in IH and the extent to which Internet sources are used in formal IH research. With open data trends in mind, this study looks for the citation of data sets.
Results: Out of 1,246 total citations, 817 (66%) were journal articles, 210 (17%) were miscellaneous, 205 (16%) were books/monographs, and 14 (1%) were government documents. The most highly cited journal titles were Lancet (86 citations) and BWHO (33 citations). Two journals that the authors expected to have high citations, but did not, were Lancet: Infectious Disease and American Journal of Public Health. The poster will also include:
1. Cited journals by subject.
2. Publication date of citations.
3. Examination of the miscellaneous category for data set citations.
Conclusions: Journal articles remain the most highly cited source type for public health research, seconded by gray literature and web resources; then monographs and United States government documents. Gray literature and web resources represent information provided by governments throughout the world, including 5 examples of government data sets. Compared to previous public health journal studies with journal article citation close to 90%, this study shows a lower percentage of journal articles (66%) relative to other source types. While recent articles are cited most, cited journal articles greatly range in age at citation. This study also showed lower citations of typically highly cited public health journal titles and major medical journals. There is a need for older journals. Librarians may want to focus on clinical journals that are relevant to their programs. Citation of data sets does not seem common yet, but this is something to monitor regarding public health data sources. Future studies could look at whether availability of global online government sources and online translation tools may be resulting in greater use of multiple language sources.
Methods: "a student's education is only as valuable as the information that a student has access to" Matt Cooper (president of the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students, 2012). Evidence-based practice is no longer a new concept in health professions or education, but its integration into allied health higher education curricula and its inclusion by health professionals in everyday, lifelong practice still presents challenges. One challenge is affordable access to research study findings and data, and to resources that index such information. A librarian from a public, research-1 university will draw from experiences and practices at her institution, and from a review of such at similar institutions. She will present methods to promote: use of open access and open educational resources, greater participation in these movements, and curriculum-related applications.
Results: This flipped presentation will include an overview of top overall and health sciences-related open access and open educational resources: how to find them and suggestions for evaluation criteria. It will also include options to promote and use Creative Commons search and licensing for discovering and sharing materials licensed for others to use, reuse, and adapt. Methods for promoting open access and open educational resources in higher educational and other settings will follow, with a final overview of newly expanding options for do-it-yourself and open science initiatives including opportunities for involvement in health research and innovation.
Conclusions: Join us, and bring your laptop, tablet, or mobile device! This presentation will be a "flipped presentation," with a brief (ten-to-fifteen minutes) voice-over PowerPoint presentation sent out ahead of time. The in-person session will offer a hands-on approach with opportunities to delve into using one or more major sources of open access or open educational resources to discover resources to recommend for supporting curricula, professional development, or training. You will also have a chance to collaborate with colleagues and explore ideas for promotional events and materials to build awareness of open access and open education initiatives. Leave with first-hand knowledge of new resources and an action plan for an event to promote these important initiatives within your community.
As a Health Sciences Librarian at a large public research university, requests for one off library sessions, or online how-to support, to teach evidence-based practice (EBP) research skills are common. Having mastered brief 'hands-on' activities to practice skills learned, I was ready to branch out, and so were some faculty with whom I work, especially in the fields of Nutrition, Exercise, and Wellness. For Spring 2013 I worked with faculty to try pre-class time assignments followed by participatory, hands-on, student reporting (flipped) class sessions on:
1. Finding the source of research reported in health news articles.
2. Identifying high level EBP research studies on a nutrition topic.
3. Exploring career and research tools in Kinesiology.
This session will include a brief overview of each case study with discussion opportunities.
Methods: Facilitating open access publishing, best practices in literature reviews, scholarly research writing, clinical research data management, preservation, and accessibility: all of these are areas that librarians are working to support in many institutions. In this paper, two librarians from two research-1 universities provide a brief review of relevant literature. They follow with lessons learned and best practices identified during experiences as part of graduate student or faculty learning and working groups. These include: participation in a clinical research evaluation course; being a coauthor during writing, submitting, and revising of a scholarly peer-reviewed article, and negotiating copyright terms with an academic publisher; and participating in a faculty writing group for mutual motivation and constructive commentary on in-process writing projects.
Results: In this observational and participative study, the authors found that by taking advantage of opportunities to join groups in their research communities, they expanded their own skill sets while also expanding their contextual understanding of researcher support needs, including faculty, instructors, researchers, and graduate students. Through physical and online participation in learning, training, and working spaces along with their constituent communities, the authors built strong connections and mutual understanding. By being present (online or in-person) when questions occurred, they increased opportunities to provide in-context support for literature review searching techniques; citation management tools; copyright, journal selection, and publishing questions; and data management planning.
Conclusions: Each profession, discipline, and employment has its learning communities, informal or time-specific subgroups that come about as needed or for required trainings. Learning communities are where those in a given discipline or employment explore tasks in a collaborative setting and learn together, developing new skills and mastery through practice with peer and expert feedback. Such communities might take the form of a course on clinical research, an informal writing group, a seminar series, or even a cross-department event-planning group. By joining such groups, librarians can build on common experiences to form stronger relationships with their communities, gaining two critical benefits: (1) opportunities to provide research and information expertise in context and (2) greater recognition as part of the community and of what librarians do and their areas of expertise.