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ERIC Number: EJ964847
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Apr
Pages: 31
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0741-0883
EISSN: N/A
Creating Discursive Order at the End of Life: The Role of Genres in Palliative Care Settings
Schryer, Catherine; McDougall, Allan; Tait, Glendon R.; Lingard, Lorelei
Written Communication, v29 n2 p111-141 Apr 2012
This article investigates an emerging practice in palliative care: dignity therapy. Dignity therapy is a psychotherapeutic intervention that its proponents assert has clinically significant positive impacts on dying patients. Dignity therapy consists of a physician asking a patient a set of questions about his or her life and returning to the patient with a transcript of the interview. After describing the origins of dignity therapy, the authors use a rhetorical genre studies framework to explore what the dignity interview is doing, how it shapes patients' responses, and how patients improvise within the dignity interview's genre ecology. Based on a discourse analysis of the interview protocol and 12 dignity interview transcripts (legacy documents) gathered in two palliative care settings in Canadian hospitals, the findings suggest that these patients appear to be using the material and genre resources (especially eulogistic strategies) associated with dignity therapy to create discursive order out of their life events. This process of genre negotiation may help to explain the positive psychotherapeutic results of dignity therapy.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Adult Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A