Talking about death and dying: Findings and insights from five conversation analytic studies (Editorial)

This special section of Patient Education and Counseling is dedicated to advancing knowledge on communication about the end of life in healthcare settings. The five studies in the special section use the theoretical tenets and the analytic techniques of conversation analysis (CA). In this editorial we briefly overview prior CA research on communication about death and dying, we illustrate how the studies in this special section advance this research, and we consider the potential of CA studies to contribute further to understandings of this area of social life.