Chapter 9. The pediatrician’s normalizing practice in well-child visits

Abstract

Drawing on a corpus of 23 video-recorded well-child visits and adopting a conversation analysis-informed approach, this chapter illustrates how pediatricians accomplish a no-problem assessment of infants’ physical growth by implementing a “normalizing practice”. It consists of pediatricians a) formulating the numerical values for length, weight, and head circumference in terms of statistical normality which is “talked into being” by referring to the relevant growth percentile, and b) in the subsequent translation of the statistically-formatted assessment into lay language. The analysis highlights the pragmatic and epistemic work of the normalizing practice: reassuring parents and ratifying medical knowledge as the most authoritative voice. I argue that pediatricians and parents construct a shared understanding of unproblematic infant growth by cooperatively constituting statistics as the ultimate trustworthy representation of “normality”.