SSKKII Kollegium / SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center- Göteborgs universitet
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/20765
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item On the Need for an Ethical Understanding of Health Care Accountability(2015) Allwood, Jens; Johansson, Inga-Lill; Olsson, Lars-Eric; Tuna, Gülüzar; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgIn Sweden, like in many other Western countries, public health care is challenged by increasing demands for care and by continuing budget deficits. Person-centered care (PCC) has been introduced as a new strategy to ameliorate the perceived fragmentation in care and is expected to decrease treatment time, reduce the need for return visits, as well as to increase patient satisfaction. However, the changing clinical practices in the PCC approach are assumed to require new accountability practices. This paper is primarily an attempt to characterize a notion of ethical accountability, i.e., a type of accountability that takes into account the human relational responsibility, partial incoherence, and power of reflection. On the grounds of this characterization, the paper aims to provide a basis, among other things, for a discussion of the possibilities of identifying and empirically studying the multimodal expressions in communication that are relevant for this type of accountability. After an initial discussion of the debate on the limits of viewing accountability as transparency, we then turn to our methodological approach and introduce a conceptual analysis of accountability. Next, we discuss some additional features of accountability. Finally, we discuss the possibilities of empirically studying the institutionalization of ethically informed accountability within person-centered health care.Item Trusting and distrusting in dialogue: A study of authentic medical consultations(2016) Allwood, Jens; Berbyuk-Lindström, Nataliya; Johansson, Inga-Lill; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgThe purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of trusting as a dynamic relational process that can vary with circumstances. Based on an analysis of a number of physician–patient consultations in a Swedish hospital, we show how consultations lead to increased trust or decreased trust and in some situations have no apparent effect. The consultations, and the accounts given in them, can lead to trusting if they correspond to the uncertainty or needs that the other party expresses, assuming willingness to collaborate and cooperate. However, counteracting distrust (perhaps using accounts) is complicated, especially when this unexpectedly becomes necessary in ongoing interaction.Item Meaning Potentials in Words and Gestures(2016) Allwood, Jens; Ahlsén, Elisabeth; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgThis paper addresses the question of what and how gestures and speech, respectively, contribute to the construction of meaning. A point of departure of is the notion of “meaning potential” which we apply to both unimodal gestures and unimodal vocalverbal units, as well as to multimodal vocal-gestural units, [1]. The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of ”meaning potential”, not only for speech, but also for gesture. Specifically, we want to discuss the possibilities of extending the notion of a meaning potential for a symbolic sign (e.g. a word) to iconic and indexical signs.Item An exploration of the nature, functions and subcategories of the discourse functional category Interactive in spoken Xhosa(2016) Hendrikse, A.P.; Nomdebevana, N.; Allwood, Jens; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgIt is a generally accepted view among discourse analysts that the so-called ‘discourse particles’ are extremely variable in meaning and multi-functional and consequently highly context-dependent for their understanding. As a result of this view no generally accepted view of the systematisation of the range of discourse particles, words and other expressions exists within the discourse analytical framework. Not all functionalist linguists agree with this viewpoint. Some of them, in fact, suggest that discourse particles belong to a single word class. Research done at Gothenburg University on a corpus of spoken language interactions in Swedish show that there is a range of communicative interactive functions around which interactive function expressions cluster. In this article we take these views further by attempting to systematise and classify Xhosa interactive functional expressions into functional subcategories of an overarching functional category which we call Interactive. This article is therefore an attempt to develop a taxonomy of functional expressions in Xhosa.Item On the attribution of affective-epistemic states to communicative behavior in different modes of recording(2015) Lanzini, Stefano; Allwood, Jens; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgFace-to-face communication is multimodal with varying contributions from all sensory modalities, see e.g. Kopp (2013), Kendon (1980) and Allwood (1979). This paper reports a study of respondents interpreting vocal and gestural verbal and non-verbal, behavior. 10 clips from 5 different short video + audio recordings of two persons meeting for the first time were used as stimulus in a perception/classification study. The respondents were divided in 3 different groups. The first group watched only the video part of the clips without any sound. The second group listened to the audio track without video. The third group was exposed to both the audio and video tracks of the clip. In order to collect the data, we used a crowdsourcing questionnaire. The study reports on how respondents classified clips containing 4 different types of behavior (looking up, looking down, nodding and laughing) that were found to be frequent in a previous study (Lanzini 2013) according to which Affective Epistemic State (AES) the behaviors were perceived as expressing. We grouped the linguistic terms for the affective epistemic states that the respondents used into 27 different semantic fields. In this paper we will focus on the 7 most common fields, i.e. the fields of Thinking, Nervousness, Happiness, Assertiveness, Embarrassment, Indifference and Interest. The aim of the study is to increase understanding of how exposure to video and/or audio modalities affect the interpretation of vocal and gestural verbal and non-verbal behavior, when they are displayed unimodally and multi-modally.Item Multimodal Communicative Feedback in Swedish(2015) Lindblad, Gustaf; Allwood, Jens; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgThis study investigates multimodal communicative feedback among speakers of Swedish. We find that the most common way of providing feedback in Swedish is by a multimodal combination of a gestural verbal and a vocal-verbal basic feedback unit, or by just a feedback word or a verbal head gesture on its own. The most common verbal head gestures are nods, and the most common vocal-verbal feedback is just one of four short words. We also find that while nods are primarily used for giving feedback, all other head gestures are more typically used for non-feedback purposes.Item Multimodal human-horse interaction in therapy and leisure riding(2015) Berbyuk, Nataliya; Allwood, Jens; Håkanson, Margareta; Lundberg, Anna; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgHorseback-riding in general, and equine-assisted therapy in particular, are widely used for leisure and rehabilitation purposes. However, few scientific studies on human-horse interaction are available. The aim of this article is to provide a description and analysis of multimodal human-horse interaction in riding sessions. Video and audio-recordings of riding sessions, interviews with the riders and observations were done in a small riding school in Western Sweden. A combination of linguistic and ethological methods is used for data analysis. The recordings are transcribed, and the sequences when human-horse interactions occur are analyzed using activity-based communication analysis and ethograms. The following typical sub-activities of riding session are distinguished and considered: “greeting horse”, “care of horse before riding”, “tacking”, “mounting horse”, “waiting for co-riders,” “riding lesson”, “dismounting horse”, “care of horse after riding” and “saying goodbye to horse.” The analysis shows that the riders use vocal verbal, visual and tactile signals when they communicate with the horses. The riders tend to communicate more verbally while caring before the ride compared to after the riding lesson. The horses’ reactions are complex, comprising tactile (e.g. touch with the muzzle), visual (e.g. lifting legs, moving in the box/stable, ear and head movements, movements of the tail, etc.) as well as auditory ones, (e.g. snorting).Item On Stages of Conflict Escalation(2015) Allwood, Jens; Ahlsén, Elisabeth; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgItem Multimodal health communication in two cultures – A comparison of Swedish and Malaysian Youtube videos(2017) Allwood, Jens; Ahlsén, Elisabeth; Lanzini, Stefano; Attaran, Ali; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgYoutube video health information about overweight and obesity, was analyzed in two different countries – Sweden and Malaysia. The videos were analyzed by using Activity based Communication Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and Rhetorical Analysis, pointing to possible cultural differences in rhetorical approach. The use of multimodality was in focus in the analysis. Considerable differences in the use of spoken and written words, pictures, animations, colour, music and other sounds were found between Swedish videos which tended to rely more on spoken words from experts and on logos, while Malaysian videos tended to rely heavily on animations, vivid colours, music and other sounds and appeal to pathos. In both countries, ethos is important, but conveyed in somewhat different ways. The length of the videos differ considerably, with Malaysian videos being very short and Swedish videos quite long.Item Pragmatics: From language as a sign system to language use(Routledge, 2017) Allwood, Jens; Göteborgs universitetItem Interview with Shan Bo(2017) Allwood, Jens; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgItem Fluency or Disfluency?(2017) Allwood, Jens; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, University of GothenburgIn this paper, I investigate the concepts of ”fluency” and ”disfluency” and argue that the application of the two concepts must be relativized to type of communicative activity. It is not clear that there is a generic sense of fluency or disfluency, rather what contributes to fluency and disfluency depends on what type of communication we are dealing with. The paper then turns to a brief investigation of what makes interactive face-to-face communication fluent or disfluent and argues that many of the features that have been labeled as disfluent, in fact, contribute to the fluency of interactive communication. Finally, I suggest that maybe it is time for a change of terminology and abandon the term “disfluent” for more positive or neutral terminology.Item Is digitalization dehumanization? - Dystopic Traits of Digitalization(2017) Allwood, Jens; SCCIIL Interdisciplinary Center, Department of Applied IT, University of GothenburgMost phenomena in the world have both positive and negative aspects (pluses and minuses). This is also true of digitalization. However, lately a lot more emphasis has been placed on the positive potentials of digitalization than on its negative potentials and already occurring negative effects. Digitalization is supposed to bring increased efficiency leading to greater speed and lower costs. The question is: greater speed and lower costs for whom? Who is actually profiting from digitalization in a narrow and broader sense? In this paper, I will discuss the idea that perfectly well functioning social practices, like human face-to-face communication, shopping, banking, medical care, education, administration, policing, travel, taxi, hotels, old age care (using robots), car driving, military attack (using drones), security, privacy etc. have already been or should be ”disrupted” (a recent positive buzz word) and exchanged for digital services, supposedly bringing greater efficiency and sometimes a “shared economy” through increased speed and lower costs. Below, we will note a number of such examples, coming, for example, from shopping, where customers are asked to register what they buy themselves and then pay with a plastic card, in this way recording their purchase for the benefit of the shop owners, credit card company and bank, or from academic education, where knowledgeable persons lecturing can be exchanged for a digital learning environment, where students learn on their own. We will pose the question: “When is digitalization warranted and when not?” When is it better to trust established human practices than to disrupt and substitute them with digital replacements? When should we not fix what is not broken? How can we digitalize with care, avoiding disruption of some of the best practices evolved by mankind?