ADDRESSING LIFE-STYLE IN PRIMARY HEALTH-CARE

The problem studied concerns how patients and physicians talk about an d make use of information regarding patient life style in the daily pr actice of primary health care. The study has been carried out at two p rimary health care centres in central Sweden. Transcribed dialogues be tween 42 patients and 12 physicians have been used as a data corpus. T he analyses concern the interactional patterns in the dialogues betwee n patient and physician, how the interlocutors address life style and for what purposes. The results show a similarity between patients and physicians with respect to the extent to which they use the discourse space. However, salient differences were found in the following way: t he physicians not only introduced and closed life style topics more fr equently than the patients did, they also used what is referred to as an agenda driven strategy to introduce them. The patients, on the othe r hand, used an interactively anchored strategy. The patients, by taki ng the reference in the life world and by making use of the life style topics, present and articulate their identity. The physicians subsume life style issues under a medical framing of the patients' problem an d they mainly address life style in order to construe a proto-typical patient rather than an individual. Copyright (C) 1996 Published by Els evier Science Ltd