Kawashima’s CCI Plan

Interaction analysis on home care around the delivery

Michie Kawashima
JSPS Research Fellow (PD) / Faculty of Liberal Arts, Saitama University

Abstract

Human interaction in general fascinates me in great deal. I started my research by working on autistic children’s communication style for my Mater in Indiana University, Bloomington. My interest in medical communication became more specific when I experienced some difficulties with women’s health during my graduate work at UCLA. I started to collect data on interactions between OBGYN doctors and patients in Japan, from 2001-2004. My studies focused on decision-making process in infertility care and self-care issues in women’s health including prenatal visits and general OBYGN check-ups.

Through my past studies, I realized how important daily lives of mothers are especially during pregnancy and first stage of child rearing. With this CCI project, I am planning to capture self-care and child-care issues in daily lives of expecting mothers and new mothers. I use a research method called “conversation analysis”, which allows me to identify some practical and conversational structures that lie under our daily lives. In order to capture what actually happens in daily lives of mothers and children, we use video-recorded data. I am interested in looking at how expecting/new mothers and others talk about their ideas on self-care and baby-care in two different countries (the United States and Japan). For example, I am interested in issues like how an experienced mother gives advices on baby-care for an expecting mother, how it is possible for new mothers learn how to take care of children and how families with new babies organize baby care. I believe this study will bring us some new thoughts about how child-rearing support should be organized in different communities.