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Advising without personalising: how a helpline may satisfy callers without giving medical advice beyond its remit
Author(s) -
Antaki Charles,
Bloch Steven
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.13088
Subject(s) - advice (programming) , competence (human resources) , internet privacy , dilemma , service (business) , set (abstract data type) , defeasible estate , limiting , psychology , public relations , medicine , computer science , business , social psychology , engineering , mechanical engineering , programming language , philosophy , epistemology , marketing , artificial intelligence , political science
Callers to telephone helplines often seek advice beyond the authorisation of those staffing the service. On health helplines, this poses a problem to the call‐taker. How do they manage the dilemma between, on the one hand, exceeding their competence and authority to give medical advice, and, on the other, leaving the caller unsatisfied with the service? We offer a framework in which to set newly identified practices along with those identified in previous studies. Using a set of calls to a medical helpline run by Parkinson's United Kingdom, we show that the call‐taker manages the problem by (i) only suggesting courses of action highly marked for impersonality or contingency (displaying a ‘low deontic stance’, Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012), and (ii) limiting the interactional risks of tailoring the advice to callers’ personal circumstances. We show how our suggested framework of ‘advising without personalising’ may guide research into the difficult job of delivering advice where the service provider must observe a limit on what they can say.