Starting from September 2021, our project has progressed as planned. We have analyzed the role of touch and affect in our existing data from Finnish GP consultations and child health clinics, developing ideas and finding relevant phenomena for research articles based on the analyses. We have also collected new data from dental clinics, once the ethical statement was received. It took longer than expected to manage the ethical and organizational issues in retrieving and using the British ‘One-in-a-Million’ data, but finally we have the data at our disposal (Many thanks to Rebecca Barnes for help). The core project group has arranged meetings bi-monthly, with extra data-sessions for each data-set. Furthermore, we have arranged a data-session with our collaborators once a month, with a by-yearly steering group meeting, next of which will be on December 5th, 2022. Below are listed our recent proceedings this autumn.
Julia has finished the data collection in pediatric clinics. The collection covers the video-recordings of 34 dental appointments of children aged between 2-12, and interviews of the dentists and nurses. Julia is also currently doing a research visit in Linköping, Sweden, hosted by one of the project’s collaborators, professor Asta Cekaite. Together with our projects’ collaborators, Julia and Enhua Guo have started to create a collection of children’s expressions of fear and resistance in pediatric encounters and the professional’s responses to these expressions. The collection covers data not only from Finland and China, but also from Iraq and US.
Julia has published the first article for the project with Johanne Philipsen titled: “Forms of professional interkinesthesisa in nurses’ body work: A case study of an infant’s stepping”
Julia also arranged a symposium in Austin, Texas, titled “The importance of touch during the time of covid” with Jürgen Streeck.
Juhana and Johanna visited the exciting symposium in Austin. Juhana gave a presentation on “Managing touch and unpleasant sensory experiences in the context of physical examination at medical consultations”, which is based on his master’s thesis and will be developed into the first journal article in his dissertation by the end of the year 2023. In the symposium, we had a chance to network with many of our collaborators, as well as other researchers whose work is very relevant to the topic of the project.
Aija visited our collaborator Rebecca Barnes in University of Oxford in June. Aija and Rebecca analysed the One in a Million dataset together, which includes video recordings of 300 British GP consultations, and developed some ideas on how to focus the analysis of affect. During the summer and autumn, we have gathered collections of different types of instances where ‘being worried’ is topicalized either by the doctor or the patient. Rebecca will soon visit us in Tampere, so we will have an intensive period to work with the collections.
One in a Million dataset includes not only video data, but also various quantitative measures such as quantitative measures from self-report questionnaires, so it offers interesting possibilities to combine CA with statistical generalizations. Tuuli and Aija have experimented with different ideas on how to quantify interactional data and how to combine it with quantitative measures.
Our team will organize a panel in ICCA in summer 2023. The panel is titled Touch and Affect in Health Care: The Intercorporeal and Interaffective Choreographies of Touching and Being Touched and we are hoping it will provide a meeting point for everyone interested in these topics!