Erzählen und Relevanzsetzung in der Schwangerenberatung

While telling stories we are giving insights into our personal experiences. This perspective has gained more attention in these past years and decades, especially in a medical context. Pregnancies are often times intense periods for those experiencing them. The experiences and narrating of being pregnant and giving birth in a medical environment are at the centre of this thesis. A combination of narrative analysis and conversation analysis is being used to answer the proposed questions. The object of analysis are conversations within the pregnancy consultation of the obstetrics department of the University Hospital in Marburg, which were videographed as part of the project “Understanding, relevance and knowledge in conversations in pregnancy consultation and obstetrics” in a cooperation of the Philipps University Marburg and the University Hospital Gießen and Marburg under the direction of Prof. Dr. Kati Hannken-Illjes and Dr. Siegmund Köhler. During these discussions in preparation for the birth, the personal history of the pregnant woman, e.g. regarding previous illnesses or previous births, is repeatedly relevant as part of taking the medical history and discussing the upcoming birth. This results in narrative sequences that are the analytical focus of this thesis. The research questions are: What form does narrative take in conversations within pregnancy consultations? What function does it fulfil in these conversations for the upgrading or downgrading of relevance? According to Sator (2003), establishing and setting of relevance is understood as an interactive process. In most of the analysed conversations, the pregnant women involved narrate, whereas the length and number of narrative sequences vary. The narrative sequences in the corpus generally take the form of narrative fragments (Birkner, 2013), in which a specific situation (sometimes embedded in a longer period) is referred to. Moreover, the narrative sequences are usually not further staged. Nevertheless, there are many variations in this respect and scenic-episodic narration was also identified in the analysis (Lucius-Hoene & Deppermann, 2002). In order to describe all the narrative sequences identified in the corpus, a broad definition of the term in the sense of, for example, Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2002) or small stories according to Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008) must be used. The individual focus made possible by narration illustrates the importance of narration as an important means of establishing relevance. The narrative itself and the form of initiation indicate relevancies as shown by the participants in the conversation. Bamberg, M. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk, 28(3), 377–396. https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2008.018 Birkner, K. (2013). Erzählfragmente: Narrative Funktionalisierungen zur Lösung der schweren Beschreibbarkeit von Schmerzempfindungen. In M. Hartung & A. Deppermann (Hrsg.), Gesprochenes und Geschriebenes im Wandel der Zeit: Festschrift für Johannes Schwitalla (S. 82–98). Verlag für Gesprächsforschung. Lucius-Hoene, G. & Deppermann, A. (2002). Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität: Ein Arbeitsbuch zur Analyse narrativer Interviews. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-11291-4 Sator, M. (2003). Zum Umgang mit Relevanzmarkierungen im ÄrztInnen-PatientInnen-Gespräch: Eine konversationsanalytische Fallstudie eines Erstgesprächs auf der onkologischen Ambulanz. Diplomarbeit. Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät Wien.