An analysis is presented of psychiatric research interviews conducted among the Iban, a longhouse dwelling people of Sarawak, Malaysia. It draws on transcripts of interviews recorded in the course of carrying out research into schizophrenia in this group. The article examines three different interview spaces within the longhouse--public, family, and private--in order to explore the interplay between ethnographic context and interview conversation. The public setting is notable for the number of relatives who join in and transform the communication from dyadic to collective interlocution; the role of repetition in recruiting them into the conversation is explored. Indirect contrast is the private space, which allows for a level of confidentiality commensurate with Western psychiatric research practice. Intermediate between the two is the family space. The communicative forms that correspond to these settings influence the way symptoms of schizophrenia are experienced and expressed in the Iban. Implications for the practice of psychiatry cross-culturally are examined.
Training for effective communication in high-stakes environments actively promotes targeted communicative strategies. One oft-recommended strategy is closed-loop communication (CLC), which emphasises three components to signal understanding: call-out, checkback and closing of the loop. Using CLC is suggested to improve clinical outcomes, but research indicates that medical practitioners do not always apply CLC in team communication. Our paper analyses a context in which speakers' linguistic choices are guided by explicit recommendations during training, namely out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) resuscitation. We examined 20 real-life OHCA resuscitations to determine whether paramedics adopt CLC in the critical first five minutes after the arrival of the designated team leader (a paramedic specially trained in handling OHCA resuscitation), and what other related communication strategies may be used. The findings revealed that the standard form of CLC was not consistently present in any of the resuscitations despite opportunities to use it. Instead, we found evidence of non-standard forms of CLC and closed-ended communication (containing the first two components of standard CLC). These findings may be representative of what happens when medical practitioners communicate in time-critical, real-life contexts where responses to directives can be immediately observed, and suggest that CLC may not always be necessary for effective communication in these contexts.
The present study examines newspaper coverage of hand, food and mouth disease (HFMD) and cancer, to compare how infectious and non-infectious diseases are represented in Malaysia. The Health Belief Model was used as the framework for selecting themes relevant to health actions for the content analysis of 69 articles (32,808 words in total) from the New Straits Times. It was found that more emphasis was given to HFMD (51 articles) than to cancer (18 articles). The information most frequently included in the articles was recommended health actions (3.8 mentions per article for HFMD; 1.1 for cancer). The articles represented HFMD as posing a greater threat than cancer, as more information on susceptibility (1.6 for HFMD; 0.3 for cancer) was included compared to severity (0.5 for HFMD; 0.2 for cancer). The HFMD articles stressed the outbreak of HFMD: incidence and deaths, symptoms, causes and preventive measures. However, the cancer articles were usually not incident-specific and focused on promoting a healthy lifestyle to avoid cancer and to warn readers of cancer prevalence. Only 17% of the cancer articles carried treatment themes. The findings suggest that news coverage of cancer should include medical research and advances to create better awareness of cancer.