Medical blogs are convenient platforms used by doctors to show their professionalism and competence, improve their positioning in search engines, and promote their digital reputation, while giving advice and sharing thoughts with their patients. As occurs with other digital platforms, blogs allow a direct contact with the reader, helping doctors establish an empathic relationship with their patients. In the field of pediatrics in particular, the blogger often assigns himself/herself a double role, as a doctor and as a father/mother who addresses other parents. As a result, the relationship between doctors and their readers is a complex one, shaped, on the one hand, by the authority and professional experience of the writer and, on the other, by the empathy resulting from the shared identity as mothers/fathers. Therefore, texts perform multiple functions (from informative, to directive and expressive) depending on the need for autonomy or affiliation of the doctor. In our study, we will explore a corpus of 450 Spanish pediatric blog entries. We will adopt a quali-quantitative method within a pragmatic approach in order to analyse facework strategies used by the pediatrician/blogger, assessing whether these enhance the doctors’ role as experts or rather emphasise affiliation in order to create an empathic relationship with the reader and with what objectives in mind. Furthermore, we will evaluate the distribution of these facework strategies according to the gender of the pediatrician. In particular, the focus will be on the distribution of personal deictic forms across different blogs and on the semantic analysis of their collocates carried out with the corpus interrogation software LancsBox 5.0. The results shed light on important aspects of stylistic variation in medical blogs, which are therefore defined as flexible and hybrid «containers», which are adapted to the bloggers’ communication needs.

Actividad de imagen en blogs de pediatría españoles

Piccioni S.
2019-01-01

Abstract

Medical blogs are convenient platforms used by doctors to show their professionalism and competence, improve their positioning in search engines, and promote their digital reputation, while giving advice and sharing thoughts with their patients. As occurs with other digital platforms, blogs allow a direct contact with the reader, helping doctors establish an empathic relationship with their patients. In the field of pediatrics in particular, the blogger often assigns himself/herself a double role, as a doctor and as a father/mother who addresses other parents. As a result, the relationship between doctors and their readers is a complex one, shaped, on the one hand, by the authority and professional experience of the writer and, on the other, by the empathy resulting from the shared identity as mothers/fathers. Therefore, texts perform multiple functions (from informative, to directive and expressive) depending on the need for autonomy or affiliation of the doctor. In our study, we will explore a corpus of 450 Spanish pediatric blog entries. We will adopt a quali-quantitative method within a pragmatic approach in order to analyse facework strategies used by the pediatrician/blogger, assessing whether these enhance the doctors’ role as experts or rather emphasise affiliation in order to create an empathic relationship with the reader and with what objectives in mind. Furthermore, we will evaluate the distribution of these facework strategies according to the gender of the pediatrician. In particular, the focus will be on the distribution of personal deictic forms across different blogs and on the semantic analysis of their collocates carried out with the corpus interrogation software LancsBox 5.0. The results shed light on important aspects of stylistic variation in medical blogs, which are therefore defined as flexible and hybrid «containers», which are adapted to the bloggers’ communication needs.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11564/772169
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