This study deals with assessment practices in talk-in-interaction during assisted eating activities involving people who are in the late-stage of dementia.
This study deals with assessment practices in talk-in-interaction during assisted eating activities involving people who are in the late-stage of dementia. The study is based on the analysis of video recordings of mealtime activities in a couple of care homes in Sweden. In general, an assessment is defined as an interactionally organized activity in which a thing, a person, or a topic in conversation is evaluated. In our data, the evaluation includes one or a series of evaluative linguistic items such as ‘good’, ‘excellent’, etc., which are often dramatized through the prolongation of vowels or/and rising pitch. The linguistic practices are also concomitant with affective intensity displayed through embodied conduct, such as direct eye gaze, body orientation and physical contacts. Using conversation analysis and multimodal analysis of interaction, we demonstrate how assessments are used by caregiving staff members in order (a) to focus the attention of the person with dementia onto the task of eating, and (b) to invite the person with dementia to align and comply with the activity of eating. Similar to findings of other studies regarding the impact of assessment on the recipients’ participations in an ongoing activity, this study shows that assessments, particularly in association with embodied conduct, may influence the recipients’ alignment. Caregivers’ assessment activities may thus be heard as a communicative resource not just to display their positioning regarding the taste of the food or how the food is taken by the person with dementia, but rather to solicit support from the person with dementia to proceed with eating by accepting the next piece of food.
