Touch as an interactional resource has gained a lot of attention in multimodal interaction analysis lately (cf. Cekaite & Mondada 2021) and has been found to be constitutive of many embodied practices in medicine (cf. Kuroshima 2020, Nishizaka 2021). In physical therapy, the co-construction of a session by the therapist and the patient involves touch as a crucial component of the treatment (cf. Roger et al. 2002).
Depending on several situational and relational factors, there may be more or less verbal interaction during physical therapy. This presentation takes a closer look at sequences of acoustic silence during haptic interventions: How is silence sequentially organized, and how is touch embedded and negotiated during these sequences? When and how do transitions from silence to verbal interaction occur? These questions will be tackled by analyzing exemplary sequences of touch in videotaped therapy sessions. Additional qualitative interviews with physical therapists trace their re-constructions and attitudes towards their touching behavior These findings are compared to the interactional analysis of touch.
This type of approach – comparing fundamentally different data sets – is not fully accepted in linguistic research, especially not in multimodal interaction analysis that strictly adheres to those aspects of a situation that can be reconstructed as sequences of actions by observation. The characteristics of each data type need to be taken into account carefully. However, the overlaps, intersections and deviations may contribute to a more thorough framework of touch in physical therapy. So, there is an underlying methodological question intertwined with the specialized topic of silence and touch in physical therapy: How can interactional analysis and scrutinizing interview data profit from one another? What are the benefits of Mixed Methods (cf. Hashemi 2019) for the study of touch in physical therapy, professional practices in Applied Linguistics and the research on helping professions?
Cekaite, A., and L. Mondada. 2021. "Towards an interactional approach to touch in social encounters." In Touch in social interaction. Touch, language, and body, edited by A. Cekaite and L. Mondada, 1–26. London, New York: Routledge.
Hashemi, M. R. 2019. "Expanding the scope of mixed methods research in applied linguistics." In The Routledge handbook of research methods in Applied Linguistics, edited by J. McKinley and H. Rose, 39–51. London: Routledge.
Kuroshima, S. 2020. "Therapist and patient accountability through tactility and sensation in medical massage sessions." Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality 3 (1). DOI: 10.7146/si.v3i1.120251.
Nishizaka, A. 2021. "Guided touch: The sequential organization of feeling a fetus in Japanese midwifery practices." In Touch in social interaction. Touch, language, and body, edited by A. Cekaite and L. Mondada, 224–248. London, New York: Routledge.
Roger, J., D. Darfour, A. Dham, O. Hickman, L. Shaubach, and K. Shepard. 2002. "Physiotherapists' use of touch in inpatient settings." Physiotherapy Research International 7 (3): 170–186.
