How doctors view their health and professional practice: An appraisal analysis of medical discourse  

Oleh:

Gallardo, Susana ; Ferrari, Laura

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 42 no. 12 (Dec. 2010), page 3172–3187.
Topik: Appraisal Systemic Functional Linguistics Medical discourse Doctors’ health
Fulltext: Gallardo_S.pdf (196.96KB)

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Doctors’ health is a major problem for healthcare systems, and several surveys have been carried out in different countries to assess the situation.Yet information about doctors’ health is limited, especially in Latin America. The problem is that many doctors find it difficult to admit that they are in trouble, that theirwork is stressful, or that they need help. Thus the aim of this paper is to explore how doctors view their health and the professional practice in relation with their health, through the analysis of the resources of appraisal in informal communication among them. We present a qualitative analysis of a corpus of texts from a discussion forum in which doctors from Spanish-speaking Latin America wrote about their health and profession.We aimed to answer the following questions: (1) Howdo doctors view and evaluate their professional practice? (2) Do doctors see theirworking conditions as a risk factor for their own health? (3) Towhat extent do doctors express positive or negative values in discussionsabout theirwork? (4)Whatdothey evaluate in the discussion? (5)Whodothey find are responsible for this situation: health systems, their patients or their colleagues? The analysis was conducted using the framework of Appraisal Theory within a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach and focused on three main areas: ‘‘appraiser’’, ‘‘appraised’’ and ‘‘goals considered valuable’’. These were examined within the semantic domain of attitude, which includes assessments of human behaviour by reference to social norms (judgment), personal feelings (affect) and assessments of the value of objects, artefacts, happenings and states of affairs (appreciation). In all three areas, attitude was found to be largely negative. Most doctors were acutely aware of risks to their own health as well as of other professional problems, and only a few expressed happiness and satisfaction with their profession. The most interesting findings were the negative judgment of social esteem with regard to neglect of their own health and the judgment of social sanction with regard to the healthcare system, as awhole,andtosenior colleagues, inparticular. Fromthepoint of viewof engagement,whendoctors valuedtheirworkashardanddistressful, they showeda tendency to present the propositions as unproblematic, so they seemed to assume that their audience sharedtheirposition.Butwhentheyreferredtothe causes ofdoctors’ illnesses,whichimplied judgments of social esteemof themselves and their colleagues, they tended to acknowledge alternative positions and they apparently aimed at persuading their audience to promote a change of situation

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