Understanding Patients' Voices

“In Understanding Patients’ Voices: A multi-method approach to health discourse, Antón and Goering with their interdisciplinary team offer intriguing and instructive insights into a highly successful multi-year examination of the relationship between language use and chronic disease. Their collaborative work illuminates the understudied perspectives of individuals living with diabetes while offering scholars and practitioners a blueprint for research that integrates linguistics, communication studies, sociology, and healthcare. I recommend this volume most enthusiastically!”

“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.”

“It’s clear that the discourse analysis discussion and examples given by the authors based on their interviews provide a different view of language use in self-management discussions. This perspective is one that will inspire interpreters and translators to listen or read more carefully when working into the target language so as to fully embrace the spirit of the speaker’s message.”