The Discourse of Comfort in Chinese Online Medical Consultations

Ying Jin

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
19 September 2025

Semantics; Social, group or collective psychology; Doctor patient relationship; Telemedicine

Series: Routledge Research in Language and Communication

This book integrates perspectives from conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology to shed light on doctor-patient communication in asynchronous web-based interactions through the lens of the discourse of comfort. While previous research has been done in this space on face-to-face encounters, this book seeks to bring further attention to comfort in online text interactions between doctors and patients, examining its capacity to convey emotional support, encourage “troubles-telling"", and facilitate problem solving in medical encounters. A discursive psychology approach provides a complementary perspective to ethnomethodology and CA frameworks, applied to an extensive corpus with data scraping in Python. While Chinese data is featured, this integrated approach allows for a nuanced view of the differences between spoken and online interactions as well as the role of technology in the organization of talk and doctor-patient communication more broadly.

This book will be valuable reading for students and scholars interested in talk-in-interaction, CA, health communication, language and health, pragmatics, and social psychology.

By: Ying Jin
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 500g
ISBN: 9781032786728
ISBN 10: 1032786728
Series: Routledge Research in Language and Communication
Pages: 180
Publication Date: 19 September 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Ying Jin is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.