Discourse in elderly care contexts has received much attention from social sciences, especially since market reasoning has pervaded social policies in the Western world. Studies in elderly care discourse include a wide range of topics such as how professionals address elderly people in care institutions or the effects of the "marketization" of elderly care services on discourse (Olaison 2016). These studies have led to the identification of discourse subtypes such as "risk discourse" (Candlin & Candlin 2002), "assessment discourse" (Kaufman 1994), or "form-filling discourse" (Karlsson & Nikolaidou 2016). The studies document the well-established fact that discourse not only reflects socio-political and medical contexts but also contributes to the construction of elderly care reality. Although this reality is hardly ever shown in fictional narratives, it is the central topic in Getting On, a TV series portraying the daily lives of elderly care professionals in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the US. The series may be defined as FASP (fiction à substrat professionnel, a term coined by Petit [1999]) which is a "particular genre of popular fiction in English, [in which] characters evolve in specialized or professional fields such as law, journalism, art, forensics or medicine" (Assier 2013: 22).
In this study, we wonder whether Getting On portrays a realistic picture of elderly care in geriatrics. The three seasons of the series were fully transcribed, annotated and compiled into a .txt file. After reviewing the literature on elderly care discourse, we proceed with both a quantitative and a qualitative corpus analysis. Our results suggest that Getting On offers an overall realistic representation of the discourses we identified in the literature, which leads us to conclude that the series may be considered a legitimate and reliable form of specialised fictional narrative.
Keywords
Elderly care discourse, specialised fictional narrative, FASP, corpus analysis
References
Assier, M-L. 2013. Using Medical Fiction to Motivate Students in Medical Fields, ESP Across Cultures 10. pp. 21-34. ISBN 978-88-7228-721-7.
Candlin, C. N., & Candlin, S. (2002). Discourse, expertise, and the management of risk in health care settings. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 35(2), 115-137.
Karlsson, A. M., & Nikolaidou, Z. (2016). The textualization of problem handling: Lean discourses meet professional competence in eldercare and the manufacturing industry. Written Communication, 33(3), 275-301.
Kaufman, S. R. (1994). Old age, disease, and the discourse on risk: geriatric assessment in US health care. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 8(4), 430-447.
Olaison, A. (2016). Processing older persons as clients in elderly care: A study of the micro-processes of care management practice. Social work in healthcare, 56(2), 78-98.
Petit, M. 1999. La fiction à substrat professionnel : une autre voie d'accès à l'anglais de spécialité, ASp 23-26. pp. 57-81.
