Tanya Stivers

Imagine for a moment the only way to confirm a yes-no question was by saying Yeah. How different would this make our communication? Relying on a large corpus of naturally occurring recordings of spontaneous social interaction, this book explores all of the ways that we confirm questions in our everyday social lives. Tanya Stivers analyzes what these different ways of responding allow us to do that is unique to each answer type. When do we answer with Yeah rather than He is, for instance; or when do we use more complicated forms of confirming? This information provides us with the basic response possibility space. From that point we can examine what the range of responses, in particular answers, tells us about what is important to us in managing social relationships through social interaction. The book explains that we can conceptualize the response possibility space as having three dimensions: alignment, autonomy, and affiliation. Speakers rely on the details of their response to position themselves at a particular point in that three-dimensional space, sometimes accepting trade-offs among the dimensions to achieve a stance that is higher in alignment and autonomy and lower in affiliation or higher in affiliation and autonomy but lower in alignment. The Book of Answers uses real-life conversations to find hidden patterns in how we do things together such as reach decisions, tell stories, or arrive at agreement or disagreement. Delving into the science of how we talk, this book investigates what those patterns tell us about human communication and our social lives.

Antibiotics will soon no longer be able to cure common illnesses such as strep throat, sinusitis and middle ear infections as they have done for the last 60 years. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasing at a much faster rate than new antibiotics to treat them are being developed. The prescription of antibiotics for viral illnesses is a key cause of increasing bacterial resistance. Despite this fact, many children continue to receive antibiotics unnecessarily for the treatment of viral upper respiratory tract infections. Why do American physicians continue to prescribe inappropriately given the high social stakes of this action? The answer appears to lie in the fundamentally social nature of medical practice: physicians do not prescribe as the result of a clinical algorithm but prescribe in the context of a conversation with a parent and a child. Thus, physicians have a classic social dilemma which pits individual parents and children against a greater social good. This book examines parent-physician conversations in detail, showing how parents put pressure on doctors in largely covert ways, for instance in specific communication practices for explaining why they have brought their child to the doctor or answering a history-taking question. This book also shows how physicians yield to this seemingly subtle pressure evidencing that apparently small differences in wording have important consequences for diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Following parents use of these interactional practices, physicians are more likely to make concessions, alter their diagnosis or alter their treatment recommendation. This book also shows how small changes in the way physicians present their findings and recommendations can decrease parent pressure for antibiotics. This book carefully documents the important and observable link between micro social interaction and macro public health domains.

Antibiotics will soon no longer be able to cure common illnesses such as strep throat, sinusitis and middle ear infections as they have done for the last 60 years. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasing at a much faster rate than new antibiotics to treat them are being developed. The prescription of antibiotics for viral illnesses is a key cause of increasing bacterial resistance. Despite this fact, many children continue to receive antibiotics unnecessarily for the treatment of viral upper respiratory tract infections. Why do American physicians continue to prescribe inappropriately given the high social stakes of this action? The answer appears to lie in the fundamentally social nature of medical practice: physicians do not prescribe as the result of a clinical algorithm but prescribe in the context of a conversation with a parent and a child. Thus, physicians have a classic social dilemma which pits individual parents and children against a greater social good. This book examines parent-physician conversations in detail, showing how parents put pressure on doctors in largely covert ways, for instance in specific communication practices for explaining why they have brought their child to the doctor or answering a history-taking question. This book also shows how physicians yield to this seemingly subtle pressure evidencing that apparently small differences in wording have important consequences for diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Following parents use of these interactional practices, physicians are more likely to make concessions, alter their diagnosis or alter their treatment recommendation. This book also shows how small changes in the way physicians present their findings and recommendations can decrease parent pressure for antibiotics. This book carefully documents the important and observable link between micro social interaction and macro public health domains.