Using Formulations and Gaze to Encourage Parents to Talk About Their and Their Children's Health and Well-Being

Abstract

In preventive health-care settings, professionals need to encourage clients to talk about their problems before they become critical. We use multimodal conversation analysis to demonstrate how public health nurses encourage parents to elaborate on their problems in a sample of preventive maternity and child health (MCH) clinics in Finland. The nurses topicalize the problem-relevant aspects of the parents’ problem-indicative talk by issuing a formulation of what the parent has just said (that is, by redescribing it in problem-related terms). This verbal practice is synchronized with a visual one—the nurse issues the formulation, receives the parent's response, and then gazes directly at them. This has the effect of prompting the parent to take up the problem and talk about it. We discuss the findings in relation to the institutional tasks in MCH care and to the role of gaze in constituting actions, such as formulations. Data are in Finnish with English translation.