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Part of
A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare: Fostering inclusion and active participation through shared understanding
Edited by Sarah Bigi and Maria Grazia Rossi
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 338] 2023
► pp. 227–250

Chapter 9
The pediatrician’s normalizing practice in well-child visits

Translating statistic measures into lay terms as a means to reassure parents

| Università di Bologna

Drawing on a corpus of 23 video-recorded well-child visits and adopting a conversation analysis-informed approach, this chapter illustrates how pediatricians accomplish a no-problem assessment of infants’ physical growth by implementing a “normalizing practice”. It consists of pediatricians a) formulating the numerical values for length, weight, and head circumference in terms of statistical normality which is “talked into being” by referring to the relevant growth percentile, and b) in the subsequent translation of the statistically-formatted assessment into lay language. The analysis highlights the pragmatic and epistemic work of the normalizing practice: reassuring parents and ratifying medical knowledge as the most authoritative voice. I argue that pediatricians and parents construct a shared understanding of unproblematic infant growth by cooperatively constituting statistics as the ultimate trustworthy representation of “normality”.

Keywords: pediatrician-parent interaction, knowledge translation, interactional construction of normality, growth assessment sequences, no-problem trajectory, conversation analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Healthcare professionals’ communicative challenges in “normality” news delivery
    • 2.1The interactional construction of “normality” in healthcare evaluations
  • 3.Well-child visits and the assessment of infants’ physical growth
    • 3.1Infants’ growth curves and their (mis)interpretations
  • 4.Data, methodology, and analytical procedures
  • 5.The pediatrician’s normalizing practice: What it is and when it occurs
  • 6.Assessing the infant’s growth: The local constitution of statistical normality
    • 6.1When statistics is not enough: Resisting the pediatrician’s normalizing practice
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.338.09ran
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