This paper focuses on a dialectic interplay of systemic and discursive inequities in the menopause experience of Filipino migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Hong Kong. Drawing on theme-oriented discourse analysis, the paper examines interviews with 15 MDWs to reveal the tensions between discursive constructions of menopause as simultaneously “normal” and “difficult.” Normalising menopause as an expectable reproductive milestone with relatively mild symptoms serves as a protective strategy, enabling women not to let it affect their employment. However, it hinders timely access to healthcare and reinforces menopause inequity. The pathologising discourse of “difficult” menopause is confined to the women’s immediate social networks of other females; these females serve as sources of information and social support. Pathologising narratives display the women’s high levels of menopausal literacy and symptoms that warrant clinical attention. We argue that addressing health inequities, including linguistic inequities, involves more than attention to systemic barriers and available linguistic resources. It requires attention to discursive processes through which health experiences and inequities are negotiated, reproduced, or resisted.

BACKGROUND:This qualitative study examines the question of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the mental health experiences of medical students in Hong Kong. Students' poor mental health is a serious public health concern because it impacts the quality of patient care they may eventually provide. It may also impact healthcare organizations through staff retention. Research in Hong Kong on this topic remains scarce, and most studies are quantitative and fail to capture medical students' actual mental health experiences during the pandemic. Understanding their experiences during the pandemic remains relevant given how radically it reshaped healthcare and education. METHODS:18 interviews with 'COVID-19 cohorts' of students (2020-2023) were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analysed qualitatively using the principles of reflexive thematic analysis. Themes related to mental health stressors and coping strategies were identified. RESULTS:The main mental health stressors were physical, socio-relational and educational. The coping strategies focused on support from others and more drastic measures such as leaving medicine altogether. CONCLUSIONS:Our findings underscore the importance of consolidated efforts and close collaboration between universities and healthcare organizations (workplaces) to ensure that policies, procedures, and infrastructure are aligned with the goal of supporting students' mental health.

In Chinese culture, the family is central to the decision-making around care provided to terminally-ill patients. Previous research examined the preferences that patients and relatives have in regard to the family's role in end-of-life care. Our article takes a discourse analytic perspective and focuses on how familial dynamics are interactionally constructed by patients in audio-recorded end-of-life care consultations in Hong Kong hospitals. We document three ways that patients construct family dynamics. First, patients expressed a reluctance to talk to their family members about their condition. Second, patients talked about their families as being reluctant in accepting and "believing" the reality of their condition. Third, patients reported an epistemic divide between themselves and their family regarding knowledge and understanding of their illness. Our findings provide insights into how to conceptualize family dynamics in interactional terms. We also reflect on how our findings can complement existing research on end-of-life care in Chinese contexts.

Objectives This scoping review maps the extant literature on students’ and graduates’ mental health experiences throughout their university-to-work transitions. The current review investigates the methodological features of the studies, the main findings, and the theories that the studies draw on to conceptualise mental health and transitions.Design This project used a scoping review methodology created and developed by Peters and colleagues and the Joanna Briggs Institute. The review searched academic databases and screened existing studies that met predetermined inclusion criteria.Data sources Seven academic databases and Google Scholar were searched with sets of search terms.Eligibility The included studies examined participants who were final-year university students or those who had graduated from university within a 3-year period. Studies published in English since 2000 and from any country were included. The review included studies examining the negative dimensions of mental health. The review excluded studies focusing on medical students and graduates.Data extraction Basic information about the studies and their findings on mental health and university-to-work transitions was retrieved. The findings are presented in tables and in a qualitative thematic summary.Results The scoping review included 12 studies. Mental health was often not explicitly defined and it’s theoretical foundations were not clearly articulated. The review identified factors, including a lack of social support and economic precarity, as sources of adverse mental health. Other protective factors in these studies—variables that guard against mental health problems—were identified, such as career preparedness and having a good job.Conclusions Despite the methodological focus on the negative aspects of mental health, people’s mental health experiences during university-to-work transitions are not uniformly negative. Clear conceptualisations of mental health in future studies will aid in developing resources to improve well-being.Trial registration number This scoping review adhered to a protocol previously published in this journal and that is registered on the Open Science Framework website (https://osf.io/gw86x).

BackgroundMental health is an issue of social and economic importance. Sociocultural and scholarly attention has largely focused on the negative aspects of mental health. That is, on mental disorders and illness and how they adversely impact our lives. In contrast, this paper forms part of a recent alternative empirical perspective in discourse-based research, by focusing on the positive aspects of mental health. In this article, we investigate how end-of-life care workers construct their positive psychological states.MethodsOur data are 38 audio-recorded and transcribed semi-structured interviews with end-of-life care workers from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. We utilized thematic analysis to identify common categorial strands across the data and discourse analysis to identify the linguistic strategies that these interviewees used to talk about their mental health.ResultsOur thematic analysis generated a superordinate theme across the interviews-namely, that of end-of-life care workers talking about their positive psychological states. We identify three generic ways that end-of-life care workers talked about these psychological states; by "foregrounding the positive," "reformulating the negative," and "dismissing the negative." Our analysis also explicates how interviewees connected social and organizational support to being a benefit to their psychological states.ConclusionsOur work contributes to existing discourse-based and sociolinguistic research on mental health by turning their focus towards a consideration of its positive dimensions. We also identify recurrent linguistics strategies used by people to construct their mental health. Our analyses point to the importance of investigating mental health as a multidimensional concept that considers participants' own reflections on their mental health.

This paper explores the skills that Hong Kong employers and graduates see as important to have in the workplace as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our data are interviews with 40 employers and 69 graduates in the territory. Using reflexive thematic analysis, our qualitative findings center around four themes. First, we highlight the necessity for graduates to have hard and soft skills when entering Hong Kong workplaces. Second, we reveal the disjuncture that exists regarding the skills that graduates acquire at university and those expected in prospective workplaces. Third, we outline the perceived strength in hard skills possessed by graduates. Fourth, we elucidate the perceived deficit in graduates' soft skills upon entering the workplace. We discuss the implications of our findings not just for understanding the workplace during the pandemic, but also in post-COVID-19 workplaces.

This article investigates moments in social interaction where tacit processes of gender attribution become visible because they are temporarily disrupted and exposed through misgendering. Our data consist of publicly available audio and video-recorded cases of misgendering, mostly from UK and US contexts. Practices of misgendering embody assumptions that map people's current gender onto their self-presentations and gender histories. Organisational features of social interaction facilitate the reproduction of these assumptions as taken-for-granted criteria for gender attribution. In the current climate of 'gender panics', the rise of a norm whereby people's self-defined gender should be respected clashes against enduring assumptions that uphold a gender order grounded in cisgenderism. The exposure of gender assumptions in moments of misgendering presents a potential for social change, but this potential is also limited by practices that reproduce (rather than challenge) the dominant gender order.

Misgendering – moments where someone refers to, describes, or addresses a person as a gender different to the one they identify with – is a challenge that trans people can face in social interaction. Misgendering is an interactional phenomenon but has yet to be examined for how it unfolds in conversation. Utilizing conversation analysis, we focus on what we term designedly intentional misgendering. We show how speakers utilize turn-design features and sequential placement to mark a misgendering as intentional. We also document how such misgendering is mobilized for different actions in social interaction. Speakers can utilize designedly intentional misgendering to display negative interactional positions towards trans people and related matters. Trans people can respond to such misgendering by negatively characterizing another speaker and their conduct. Our work advances existing discussions around the intentionality of misgendering and trans people's interactional agency.

INTRODUCTION:University students face challenges when starting their careers and entering the workforce after tertiary education is associated with negative psychological outcomes. The planned scoping review will synthesise the literature on the impact of university-to-work transitions on the mental health of new and recent graduates. We will describe the characteristics and main findings of the studies, and will examine the variables associated with, and the theories used to explain, the relationship between transitions to work and graduates' mental health. METHODS:We will search the following databases: Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PSYCINFO, Social Sciences Citation Index, CINAHL Plus, Ovid MEDLINE and Google Scholar, to locate published and unpublished literature. The included studies will focus on undergraduate and postgraduate university students during planned or current university-to-work transitions, as well as early-career workers. We will include studies involving people who have left or are in their final year of study, are undergoing career transition preparation or have worked for no longer than 3 years since graduation. Studies from all countries, those published in English and since 2000, will be included. We will use a set of predefined search terms and we will extract studies using the EndNote V.20 reference management software. Two reviewers will screen and assess the identified studies using the Covidence software. Finally, we will present the data in a summary table and will qualitatively analyse the studies using thematic analysis. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION:Our scoping review does not require ethical approval. The scoping review's findings will be disseminated in peer-reviewed journal articles and conference presentations, and will inform the development of training resources for different stakeholders as part of a wider research project. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER:The study has been registered with the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/gw86x).

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has changed how healthcare professionals, patients, and relatives communicate with each other. Aim: We take stock of the current state of affairs in healthcare communication research amid the continuing pandemic. We draw upon our expertise as communication researchers and clinical experience as a medical professional working in the pandemic to reflect upon the challenges and opportunities that the pandemic has created for healthcare communication research and practice. Findings: We explore five topics of importance for research on healthcare communication during COVID-19 and its aftermath. First, we discuss how the ‘epistemics’ of COVID-19 are navigated in patients’ communication with doctors. Second, we elaborate on the problems in communicating the prognostic uncertainty of COVID-19. Third, we consider online COVID-19 support groups as an important site for investigating the pandemic’s multi-dimensional impacts. Fourth, we consider the challenges of the shift from face-to-face to video-mediated healthcare service provision. Fifth, we explore how fast-tracking graduate medical students into the workforce left them feeling unprepared for the communicative demands of such work. Conclusion: We call for direct collaboration between medical professionals and healthcare communication researchers to utilize evidence-based findings to solve the communicative demands posed by the pandemic. Collaboration and research need to be adaptive to the dynamic nature of the pandemic.

Using video recordings of the setup phase of cognitive neuroscience experiments, we examine episodes where experimenters show and tell participants how a particular tool (a “blunt needle”) will be used and how that might feel. We analyze how experimenters describe and demonstrate prospective sensations for participants. We show that experimenters often describe sensations “by negation” (saying what participants will not experience) and sometimes “indirectly” (for example, by formulating what they will do). We show that these descriptions are elaborated through demonstrations of sensations, both on the experimenters' and the participants' bodies. Importantly, we document how the interplay of the description and demonstration of sensations is important in reassuring participants about the nonharmful nature of the tool and its use.

In telephone-mediated service encounters, there are limits on how parties interact with one another. Speakers are restricted to only verbal (what they say) and aural (what they hear) means of communication. Therefore, a practical problem at the heart of such interactions is how speakers manage embodied conduct, given that they can only hear - rather than see the other person. We investigated how verbal and embodied conduct were managed in a corpus of 63 calls to a New Zealand helpline service where callers (complainants) interact with conciliators (institutional representatives) to complain about, and attempt to resolve disputes with their electricity and gas providers. Using conversation analysis, we document two ways that callers could manage verbal and embodied conduct in a particular type of sequence in these calls.

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Interruption has predominantly been conceptualised as a violation of normative turn-taking practices and speakership rights. The present study further develops a broader perspective by showing that speakers can orient to matters of sequential organisation, other than turn-taking, when they claim their own talk is interruptive. Drawing from a larger collection of 72 cases where explicit claims to interruption were made, this paper uses conversation analysis to examine a subset of 20 instances where speakers specifically described what they were doing was interruption. Our target phenomenon was expressions such as “I want to interrupt” and “apologise for interrupting”. Speakers can prospectively mark some upcoming talk as interruptive and they can also retrospectively cast what they have just said as an interruption. Either way, the observably relevant disruption was not to turn-taking but to other sequences of action, namely the proper order of activities, the organisation of topics and adjacency pairs. Furthermore, by focusing on cases from institutional settings we propose that by explicitly claiming one's own talk as interruptive participants make relevant membership categories and their associated deontic responsibilities for the progression of activities within institutional settings.