The New Discourse of Healthcare
A Corpus and Discourse Analysis Approach to a Q&A Website

Area 06 – Scienze mediche

The New Discourse of Healthcare, by analyzing a health question and answer internet resource, Go Ask Alice!, offers a substantial contribution to the growing field of studies in online health communication. How do young people describe their health concerns and ask for information and advice, and how do healthcare professionals at the online service respond to these concerns and requests? In answering this question, The New Discourse of Healthcare takes an interdisciplinary approach to discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and recent work in computer-mediated communication, and shows how these fields interplay in establishing new frameworks for health communication research. The shift towards e-health communication as a multifaceted field of practice is visible throughout the seven chapters of the book, which provides, through theoretical, methodological, and praxis-driven issues, a promising model for healthcare discourse analysis. Its insightful study of how adolescents and healthcare professionals, regardless of differences in age, competencies, needs and concerns, cooperate as equals in the pursuit of successful treatment outcomes, makes this work of potential interest not only to scholars in linguistics and communication studies, but also to those in education and healthcare policy.

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