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Qualitative Health Research
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Positions in Doctors’ Questions During Psychiatric Interviews

Justyna Ziólkowska

Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Wroclaw, Poland, jziolkowska{at}swps.edu.pl

In this article I apply the concept of positioning to the analysis of 15 initial psychiatric interviews. I argue that through their questions the psychiatrists-in-training impose positions requiring the patients to gaze at themselves and their actual problems from particular perspectives. I point to three such positions: (a) the position of the observing assessor, from which it is expected that the patients will make a detached assessment of themselves or their problems, (b) the position of the informing witness, which requires the patients only to verify the information about themselves, and (c) the marginal one, the position of the experiencing narrator, from which talk about experiences and problems is expected. I explore the roots and consequences of the positions, with particular attention toward objectivization of the patients’ experiences in the dominant witness and assessor positions. I conclude with a discussion about the medical model in psychiatry.

Key Words: communication • doctor-patient • discourse analysis • interviews • medical/health care discourse • medicalization • psychiatry • questions • open-ended • storytelling • suffering

Qualitative Health Research, Vol. 19, No. 11, 1621-1631 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1049732309350685
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