The macrostructure of the interview: Are traumatic brain injury interactions structured differently to control interactions?

Previous descriptions of discourse deficits following traumatic brain injury (TBI) at a macrostructural level have used analyses such as cohesion and story structure. This paper proposes a macrolinguistic analysis called generic structure potential analysis (GSP) which describes the overall structuring of the unfolding process of two types of interviews. Seven TBI subjects are compared with matched control subjects across two conditions: a community education information-giving encounter to two 16 year old school students and an information requesting interaction with the researcher. The possible GSP elements of these types of encounters include greeting, identification, approaches which enable interactants to establish interpersonal links, centring which directly relate to the purpose of the interviews, leave-taking and goodbye. The GSP of student interactions was similar for TBI and control subjects but differences were noted in the researcher condition. The value of placing TBI subjects in information giving roles and the importance of the communication partner's contributions to the interaction is highlighted. GSP analysis allows the clinician/researcher to analyse the interview context by taking the contextual configuration into account. It may provide a valuable clinical tool in the assessment and treatment of discourse deficits which commonly follow TBI.