Age ascription as a resource and a source of resistance - An interactional study of health professionals' castings of patients into the category 'old'

- Health professionals cast patients into the category 'old'.
- These castings serve as a resource to frame a perspective or an action as normal.
- Castings with a fateful approach to old age challenge patients' doctorability/agency.
- The castings are negotiable; the patients accept, modify, interrupt or reverse them.

This case study aims to give an understanding of what actions health professionals' castings of patients into the category 'old' perform on a medical and social level as well as what actions patients' interactional management of these castings perform. Particularly, this study aims to bring to the fore the negotiability of health professionals' perspectivating age ascriptions. This is done with the conversation analytic method (CA) according to which altercasting is a mutual construction performed turn by turn and shaped by the reactions of the interlocutor who can approve, resist, or modify the identity in question. The data are drawn from two Swedish television documentaries on health encounters. Three major findings are presented. Firstly, the castings of the patients into the category 'old' are in several cases embedded in metaphors that either position the patient's body in the role of a victim of old age or in the role of a machine to routinely check. Secondly, the castings with a fateful approach to old age are ambivalent; whereas they serve as resources for the health professionals' normalizing of medical projects and perspectives, they can constitute sources of problems for the patients' doctorability and/or agency. Thirdly, the health professionals' perspectivating age ascriptions are negotiable; their design facilitates resistance to them, and the patients accept, modify, interrupt or reverse them.