‘Some’ versus ‘Any’ Medical Issues: Encouraging Patients to Reveal Their Unmet Concerns

In this chapter we reconsider the design, implementation and dissemination of an NIH-funded study of unmet patient concerns that we conducted in 2005–6 and published in 2007 (Heritage et al., 2007). The study took an aspect of preference organisation that has, to our knowledge, never been systematically studied, and applied it to a well-known problem in primary-care visits: the fact that patients frequently do not voice the full range of their concerns. We review the decisions we made about the design and implementation of the study and about the interpretation of its results. We also contrast this study with ‘regular’ CA studies and conclude with an appeal for eclecticism in the application of CA to real-world problems. We begin with some comments on the distinction between conversation-analytic studies and their applied counterparts.