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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. 291–312

Chapter 12
Peer experts as actors for shared understanding in Spanish online health fora

| Université catholique de Louvain
| Universitat de Barcelona

In this study, we compare how ‘peer experts’, understood as lay users who have achieved expertise and credibility on a particular health condition through personal experience (Vydiswaran and Reddy 2019), fulfill a bridging function by creating shared understandings on patient fora on diabetes vs eating disorders. The analysis revealed that the discursive construction of expertise concerning both conditions differs in relation to the weight and the nature of the personal experience claimed by the peer expert. The linguistic material deployed in each forum to index inclusion and shared understanding concerns the use of person reference, the use of cognitive verbs, as well as certain strategies that might question the experiences and shared understandings negotiated by members of both patient communities.

Keywords: peer expert, patient forum, person reference, cognitive verbs, shared understanding, parallel assessment, second story, Spanish, diabetes, eating disorders
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Procedure and analysis
    • 2.3Conditions involved
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Epistemic asymmetries: Differential experiential knowledge between peer experts and novices
    • 3.2Epistemic symmetries: Shared understanding
      • 3.2.1Person reference
      • 3.2.2Use of cognitive verbs
      • 3.2.3Parallel assessments and second stories
      • 3.2.4The online support group as a place for learning
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.338.12dec
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