Good Enough: Low-Grade Assessments in Caregiving Situations

Drawing on prior research on how the sequential negotiation of upgrades and downgrades in the intensity of assessment terms are used to display agreement, make epistemic claims, or segment courses of action, this study explores low- and high-grade assessments in domiciliary elderly care in Denmark and Sweden. The data consist of video recordings of home visits where home help providers assist senior citizens with personal hygiene and domestic tasks. Low- and high-grade assessments are differentially distributed in this data. Low-grade assessments are routinely used to achieve closure of a practical task performed by the home helper on behalf of the senior citizen. High-grade assessments are rare, and they are specifically not used in sequences that target the services rendered by the home helper. Our analysis of assessments in sequences that achieve task closure reveals an interactional metric where ogood enougho rather than excellent (or awful) is oriented to as the benchmark for evaluation of task outcome. This finding contrasts with prior research on ordinary conversation, which has shown that assessments tend to be upgraded in intensity over the course of the sequence.