Disque saúde: um processo de recontextualização na oralização de teleatendentes

Abstract

There is currently a large number of institutions called Call Centers that provide some kind of service to their users through telephone calls. This service is offered by a special kind of interaction that constitutes the fitting of two different interactions: an explicit one, between the attendant and the caller over the phone and another which is implicit, between the attendant and a virtual participant, the computerized system (OLIVEIRA; BARBOSA, 2002). In this dissertation, 30 telephone interactions between users and the attendant of a Health Line, which is an assistance service (136) created by the Health Ministry to offer Brazilian population information about diseases, forms of prevention, treatment, among others, were analyzed by means of the theoretical and methodological perspective of recontextualization (BERNSTEIN, 1996). The interactions were recorded in 2009 and transcribed according to the conventions proposed by Jefferson (1984), which were translated and adapted by Schnack, Pisoni and Ostermann (2005). The attendants of the Health Line - when offering information to the users - rely on the support of a database which contains information about STDs. Thus, they act as a mediator between the information in this database and the user. There is, in this mediation, a process of recontextualization, i.e., removing information from a more technical context to transmit it to the user in a more informal way. This process is characterized as scientific popularization (ZAMBONI, 2001). This study aimed to analyze if the user's initial request, as well as other requests that may arise during the interaction, is, in fact, attended by the attendants of this governmental service, considering, for this analysis, the adjacency pair user’s request - attendance of the request. Therefore, we consider some elements that can influence this interaction, such as discourse genre (BAKHTIN, 2003), the purpose of the enunciation (Bakhtin, 2003), and the communication contract (CHARAUDEAU, 2010). Still, we have used some elements of Conversation Analysis, among them the notion of pair-adjacency (SACKS; SCHEGLOFF; JEFFERSON, 1974). The research study shows that there are cases in which the user's request is not attended, as well as cases in which there is a gap between what is requested by the user and what is offered by the attendant. This research study stems from a larger project coordinated by Professor Ana Cristina Ostermann.