Communication between staff and residents in a Japanese nursing home for the elderly

One by-product of Japan’s recent demographic developments is a constantly growing number of elderly people in need of care. This project focuses on the communicative properties of care for the elderly in institutional contexts by examining linguistic interaction between staff and residents in a Japanese nursing home. The major questions to be addressed are as follows:

• What are the general characteristics of communication between residents and caring staff?
• What linguistic strategies are applied in order to reconcile institutional goals with personal needs?
• What differences and similarities can be observed in cross-cultural comparison?
• How could “care communication” be improved?

I work with a sample of ca. 110 resident-staff conversations recorded during the morning care activities in a caring facility north of Tokyo. Analytical categories focus on both quantitative and qualitative issues, including terms of address, use of honorifics and variation between formal and plain speech styles, off-topic management, organization of conversational openings and closings, and occurrence of joking and laughter, among others.