Skip to main content

Illness Negotiations and the Particular: Exploring Online Forum Interactions About Endometriosis

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover Analyzing Digital Discourses
  • 458 Accesses

Abstract

Melander uses the increasingly debated disease endometriosis as an example to explore ongoing processes of negotiating a disease in unfolding forum interactions. Methodologically, the chapter explores a possible combination of discourse analytical tools with concepts from Actor-Network Theory, which more distinctly emphasize the unfolding practices, and ties the ongoing societal process to concrete linguistic practice. As the analysis demonstrates, the interlocutors make use of various shifts between general and particular aspects of the disease, most often represented by personal experiences. Such personal narratives can strengthen a claim put forward, as well as nuance and broaden the disease category. Melander also demonstrates the more or less established prerequisites that underline the interactions, thus pointing to the possible ways of discussing illness experiences in the forum.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 139.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://etikprovningsmyndigheten.se/.

  2. 2.

    The questions marks are most likely a typing error, with quotations marks as the intended punctuation marks. The original website text uses quotation marks.

References

  • Ballard, Karen, Karen Lowton, and Jeremy Wright. 2006. What’s the delay? A qualitative study of women’s experiences of reaching a diagnosis of endometriosis. Fertility and Sterility 86 (5): 1296–1301.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barker, Kristin K. 2008. Electronic support groups, patient-consumers, and medicalization: The case of contested illness. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 49 (1): 20–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Benwell, Bethan, and Elizabeth Stokoe. 2006. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Billig, Michael. 1985. Prejudice, categorization and particularization: From a perceptual to a rhetorical approach. European Journal of Social Psychology 15 (1): 79–103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Billig, Michael. 1996. Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Briggs, Charles L. 2005. Communicability, racial discourse, and disease. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 269–291.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bury, Mike. 2001. Illness narratives: Fact or fiction? Sociology of Health & Illness 23 (3): 263–285.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1981. Unscrewing the big Leviathan: How actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro-and Macro-Sociologies, ed. Karin Knorr and Aaron Cicourel, 277–303. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conrad, Peter, Julia Bandini, and Alexandria Vasquez. 2016. Illness and the internet: From private to public experience. Health 20 (1): 22–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Edwards, Derek. 1991. Categories are for talking: On the cognitive and discursive bases of categorization. Theory & Psychology 1 (4): 515–542.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Edwards, Derek. 2014. Rhetoric, cognition and discursive psychology. In Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Psychology: Essays in Honour of Michael Billig, ed. Charles Antaki and Susan Condor, 29–42. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox, Nick J., Katie J. Ward, and Alan J. O’Rourke. 2005a. The ‘expert patient’: Empowerment or medical dominance? The case of weight loss, pharmaceutical drugs and the internet. Social Science & Medicine 60 (6): 1299–1309.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox, Nick, Katie Ward and Alan O'Rourke. 2005b. Pro‐anorexia, weight‐loss drugs and the internet: An ‘anti‐recovery’ explanatory model of anorexia. Sociology of Health & Illness 27 (7): 944–971.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hagren Idevall, Karin. 2015. Punktualiseringar av islam, muslimer, svenskar och det svenska samhället: Diskriminering och privilegiering i kommentarsfältsdiskussioner. [Punctualizations of Islam, Moslems, Swedes and the Swedish society: Discrimination and privileging in comments sections]. In Från social kategorisering till diskriminering. Fyra studier av språk och diskriminering och ett modellförslag, ed. Mats Landqvist, 41–71. Huddinge: Södertörn University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hamilton, Mary. 2011. Unruly practices: What a sociology of translations can offer to educational policy analysis. Educational Philosophy and Theory 43 (S1): 55–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hanell, Linnea, and Linus Salö. 2017. Nine months of entextualizations. Discourse and knowledge in an online discussion forum thread for expectant parents. In Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, ed. Caroline Kerfoot and Kenneth Hyltenstam, 154–170. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, Bruno. 1999. On recalling ANT. In Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John Hassard, 15–25. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Law, John. 1992. Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. System Practice 5 (4): 379–393.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, Mihan. 2017. Don’t give up! A cyber-ethnography and discourse analysis of an online infertility patient forum. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 41 (3): 341–367.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Markham, Annette, and Elizabeth Buchanan. 2012. Ethical decision-making and internet research: Recommendations from the AoIR ethics working Committee (Version 2.0). https://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf. (15 December‚ 2017.)

  • Michael, Mike. 1996. Constructing Identities: The Social, the Nonhuman and Change. London: Sage.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Morrow, Phillip R. 2006. Telling about problems and giving advice in an Internet discussion forum: Some discourse features. Discourse Studies 8 (4): 531–548.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Orvesto Internet. 2018. https://www.kantarsifo.se/rapporter-undersokningar/rackviddsmatningar/orvesto-internet. (10 July, 2018.)

  • Pomerantz, Anita. 1986. Extreme case formulations: A way of legitimizing claims. Human Studies 9 (2–3): 219–229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Räisänen, Christine, and Anneli Linde. 2004. Technologizing discourse to standardize projects in multi-project organizations: Hegemony by consensus? Organization 11 (1): 101–121.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stommel, Wyke, and Tom Koole. 2010. The online support group as a community: A micro-analysis of the interaction with a new member. Discourse Studies 12 (3): 357–378.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stommel, Wyke, and Joyce Lamerichs. 2017. Interaction in online support groups: Advice and beyond. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication, ed. Heidi Ehernberger Hamilton and Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, 198–211. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • von Rohr, Marie-Thérèse Rudolf, Franziska Thurnherr, and Miriam A. Locher. 2019. Linguistic expert creation in online health practices. In Analyzing Digital Discourse. New Insights and Future Directions, ed. Patricia Bou-Franch and Pilar Blitvich Garcés-Conejos, 219–250. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Whelan, Emma. 2007. ‘No one agrees except for those of us who have it’: Endometriosis patients as an epistemological community. Sociology of Health & Illness 29 (7): 957–982.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ida Melander .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Melander, I. (2021). Illness Negotiations and the Particular: Exploring Online Forum Interactions About Endometriosis. In: Johansson, M., Tanskanen, SK., Chovanec, J. (eds) Analyzing Digital Discourses. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84602-2_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84602-2_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84601-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84602-2

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics