Förhandlingar om kroppen – en samtalsanalytisk studie av smärta och ansträngning i friskvårdsaktiviteter
Abstract
Negotiations about the body – a CA study of pain and effort in personal training and massage
Even though physical pain and sensations are a common human experience, they are subjective, difficult or even impossible to express and share with others. In this study, we investigate expressions of pain during ongoing physical activity, here personal training and massage, and describe how the participants negotiate and make meaning of them in interaction.
The data was extracted from a 14-hour corpus of Swedish-spoken interactions in preventive health care activities in Sweden and Finland. We demonstrate how participants create common understanding of the clients’ experienced pain by evaluating it in relation to the physical activity. Our results show that pain usually is treated as avoidable or as an indication of the need to correct the activity. In special cases, such as in cases of pain caused by prior sessions of physical training, the participants treat pain as acceptable. There are also cases where we see an orientation towards pain as a sign of accomplished effort, and therefore worth aiming at in this context.
In our study, the body and performance of one of the participants are in focus of the physical activity, and also in focus of the verbal interaction. Interactional work is done by the experts and lay persons respectively to handle this socially delicate situation. The study contributes to the field of embodied interaction and provides new knowledge about preventive healthcare as a phenomenon in modern society.
