Question/answer-sequences in contact tracing telephone calls in Flanders during the Covid-19 pandemic’

Abstract

Background: During the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, one of the critical strategies employed by governments around the world to contain the virus’s spread was contact tracing. In Belgium, contact tracing was mostly implemented through government-mandated call centres employing a mix of experienced and recently recruited telephone workers. As the collection of reliable information concerns a central goal of contact tracing interactions, the posing of questions by contact tracers becomes a highly consequential, yet challenging task to execute. Expansions which accompany questions may be useful as important vectors to manage the sensitivity of invasive questioning of index patients.

Objective: In this article, we zoom in on the multiple guises of how questions were posed by Flemish contact tracers in the period 2020-2021, with specific attention to the positioning of the contact tracers’ questions in adjacency pairs (expansions), and how this relates to the accomplishment of the goals of the contact tracing call (including obtaining relevant and truthful answers and managing the intrusive and sensitive aspects of questioning behaviour).

Methods: A corpus of 100 contact tracing calls conducted in Dutch between a contact tracer and index patient was gathered between late 2020 and early 2021. A quantitative analysis was conducted on the transcribed interactions to identify the type of expansion applied by contact tracers (pre-expansions, insert expansions and post- expansions) and the interactional meaning accomplished in the expansion (e.g., motivation for asking a question, apology for the intrusion, an explanation of a term used, etc.).

Results: Our results show that contact tracers mostly expand after an answer has been received, rather than anticipate the need to frame a question-answer sequence or guide the index patient enroute from question to answer. Most prevalent as pre-expansions are question announcements and recall of what was said earlier. In the case of insert expansion, the most prevalent interactional accomplishments are clarifications or time management signals. In the case of post- expansions, the prevalent types are backchannel, question clarifications and repetitions of the index patient’s answer as a form of acknowledgement or display of information processing.