Understanding Patients' Voices

This volume illustrates the process of conducting interdisciplinary, multi-cultural research into the relationship between patient language use and chronic disease management. The ten chapters in this book provide a model for interdisciplinary research in health discourse from start to finish. Part I describes in detail the conceptualization and design of a multi-year research project exploring language use among people living with diabetes. Part II offers a sampler of a variety of qualitative, quantitative, and contrastive methodologies that have considerable potential in the study of health discourse. Part III brings the research process full circle by discussing issues related to adapting research protocols to diverse cultural contexts, translating results into practice, and working in interdisciplinary teams.

Srikant Sarangi, Cardiff University:
In the authors’ voice the book is “the interdisciplinary study of the relationship between language use and chronic disease management”. More precisely the book addresses the experience of patients with Type 2 Diabetes from a combined health literacy and linguistics perspective. Written in a reader-friendly style and adopting a contrastive as well as a cumulative mixed-methods approach, the authors provide rich insights into how the language (and metaphors) of one’s illness experience (including understanding and expectation) can index patterns of adherence/non-adherence and self-management. The reported findings have the potential to be translated into profiling chronically ill patients as a precursor for their clinical and personal care. The authors deserve credit for sharing their breadth of methodological and analytical repertoires in a detailed, step-by-step manner – which will easily translate to healthcare communication research in parallel contexts.