“Nobody Thinks Twice About Asking:” Women with a Fertility Problem and Requests for Information

For women with a fertility problem, responding to questions about childbearing, pregnancy, and the nature of infertility is a salient issue. In this study of talking about infertility, women described their experiences in handling such requests for information. Results suggest that requests come in a variety of forms, that women attribute multiple and potentially conflicting meanings to such requests, and that requests can elicit a variety of responses. From a communication standpoint, such inquiries suggest the varied ways that conversational partners can attempt to elicit disclosive information, thus enabling or constraining the emergent nature of the interaction

Tensions and Contradictions in Interns’ Communication about Unexpected Pregnancy Loss

Early miscarriage is an unexpected pregnancy complication that affects up to 25% of pregnant women. Physicians are often tasked with delivering the bad news of a pregnancy loss to asymptomatic women while also helping them make an informed decision about managing the miscarriage. Assessing the communicative responses, particularly the discursive tensions embedded within providers’ speech, offers insight into the (in)effective communication used in the delivery of bad news and the management of a potentially traumatic medical event. We observed and analyzed transcripts from 40 standardized patient encounters using Baxter’s relational dialectics theory 2.0. Results indicated that interns invoked two primary distal already-spoken discourses: discourses of medicalization of miscarriage and discourses of rationality and informed consent. We contend that tensions and contradictions could affect how women respond to the news of an impending miscarriage and offer practical implications for communication skills training

Co-Ownership of Private Information in the Miscarriage Context

Pregnancy loss due to miscarriage is a pervasive health issue. Although talking about the miscarriage experience with friends and family members has been linked to better adjustment, revealing this loss can be difficult because discussing a miscarriage often makes people uncomfortable. Moreover, couples often manage this information jointly as they decide whether to share the miscarriage with people outside the dyad. We conducted in-depth interviews with couples to explore the nature of co-ownership in the miscarriage context and to identify the privacy rules that couples develop to manage this information. We found that couples frame miscarriage as a shared but distinct experience and that both members exert rights of ownership over the information. Couples' privacy rules centered on issues of social support and others' need to know about the loss. Even though couples described their privacy rules as implicitly understood, they also recalled having explicit conversations to develop rules. We discuss how the management of co-owned information can improve communication and maintain relationships

The Discursive Dynamics of Disclosure and Avoidance: Evidence from a Study of Infertility

Recent research and theorizing about privacy management suggests a need to consider discursive dynamics and interpretations of meaning in conversations involving disclosure, topic avoidance, secret-keeping, and other privacy management processes. In the following study, I drew on a specific set of theoretical assumptions as the basis for an investigation of privacy management in the context of infertility. Based on in-depth interviews with 23 women coping with infertility, results reveal the varied ways that private topics arose in conversations (e.g., discloser initiated conversations, responses to requests for information), the diverse ways that women concealed or revealed their struggles with infertility, and the multiple dilemmas they faced in managing private information about their fertility problem. I discuss the results in light of the extant literature on managing private information about sensitive issues and suggest that scholars must continue to focus on conversational dynamics to understand fully how privacy management processes unfold in everyday conversations

‘Where are all the men?’ A post-structural feminist analysis of a university's sexual health seminar

Set against the background of efforts to promote sexuality education and sexual health in a university setting, this paper focuses on a sexual health seminar offered at a midwestern US university. Using a post-structural feminist framework, we analysed discourses from qualitative surveys, newspaper coverage and participant observation. We argue that the framing of the seminar posed an obstacle to receiving health care, altercasted women in disempowering roles and failed to acknowledge men's voices. It is important to address entrenched gender biases, power imbalances and assumptions that undermine students' engagement with sexual health education and access to services. Based on this analysis, we developed recommendations for sexuality education of university students informed by feminist understandings of health

Public Discourses about Teenage Pregnancy: Disruption, Restoration, and Ideology

Two recent incidents in the United States generated a wealth of public discourses about a particular reproductive health issue: adolescent childbearing. As the media, political pundits, and private citizens pondered the meaning of these events, they expressed viewpoints, explanations, and possible solutions in mass-mediated outlets. We examined the discourses communicated in such outlets to understand how public discussion of teenage pregnancy reveals ideological assumptions about reproductive health, ideal family forms, and the expected life course