CURE: Health Dialogues

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Everything that happens related to health and health care involves language, and dialogues between healthcare providers and patients form the basis of what we know and believe about diagnosis, illness, treatment, and recovery. The Health Dialogues Research Group—a designated CAS CURE (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience) class—is a unique opportunity for undergraduates to gain hands-on experience conducting original interaction research through a sociolinguistic lens. Working with a corpus of interactions between healthcare providers and patients, we will explore questions like the following, as well as others that students develop: - What metaphors do doctors use to explain treatments? what metaphors do patients use to describe pain? - How do patients tell narratives of illness? of diagnosis? - How do doctors communicate risk? The class will involve instruction on conducting linguistic research and developing research questions, support for managing a collaborative research project, training on qualitative data analysis software, and "research team meetings": opportunities to practice sharing problems and proposing solutions to colleagues. Students will gain experience that mirrors how research is done in think tanks, nonprofit social science research organizations, and industry. Students will also have opportunities to present their findings to the Georgetown community and to industry professionals. Participation in the Health Dialogues Research Group is useful for linguistics majors, as well as medical humanities students, psychologists/anthropologists/sociologists, human science majors, pre-med students, and anyone interested in how language and interaction work in healthcare contexts.