Care Communication: Making a home in a Japanese eldercare facility

This book studies communication in institutional eldercare. It is based on audio-recorded interactions between residents and staff in a Japanese care facility. The focus is on the morning care routines, which include getting the residents out of bed and ready for the day. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis explores the characteristics of care communication as they become manifest in the interactional small print. Topics include the use of terms of address and formal speech, the basic organisation of openings and closings, the difficulties of talking while working―and, at times, working while talking―and tempo differences between residents and staff as they move along between bed and breakfast. The research findings are contextualised with results from previous studies, tracing significant features and explanation for deviant cases.

The author is a trained linguist and certified nursing assistant with first-hand working experience in institutional eldercare.

Peter Backhaus is Associate Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo. His main research interests are sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and writing and orthography. Publications include Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo (Multilingual Matters, 2007) and Communication in Elderly Care: Cross-cultural Perspectives (ed., Continuum, 2011).