"We can’t let it happen": Risk talk in telephone consultations between nurses and parents of infants with a genetic condition

Abstract

In Hong Kong all new-borns are routinely tested for G6PD deficiency, a mild hereditary disorder (commonly known as favism). Parents whose infants are diagnosed with the condition are informed about it via telephone by genetic nurses of a specialist clinic. This paper focuses on how risk information is communicated to the parents. Previous research on health risk communication has primarily dealt with communicating risk that is uncertain and probabilistic; while less attention has been paid to communicating risk that is certain and manageable. Using theme-oriented discourse analysis (Roberts and Sarangi, 2005) and drawing on a corpus of 50 audio-recorded telephone consultations, this paper examines how ’certain’ and ‘manageable’ risk is discursively managed by the participants of these encounters. The analysis shows that the risk management talk is framed around the notion of ‘knowing’ about a genetic condition, in particular the ‘benefits of knowing’ that are weighed against the ‘risks of knowing’. The benefits refer to the parents’ ability to manage the condition; and the risks refer to possible adverse scenarios and parents’ increased anxiety. The analysis shows that the risk talk is framed differently by the participants in terms of risk-benefit interplay. While the nurses’ talk focuses on the manageability of the condition, the parents’ talk typically deals with the incurable nature of the condition. We discuss a range of discourse strategies, such as contrast, foregrounding, hypothetical scenarios and accounts, through which the participants negotiate their different perspectives regarding ‘certain’ and ‘manageable’ risk