Sense-Making/Giving during the COVID-19 Crisis: A Multi-Method Study of Health Podcasting in Australia and the U.S.

Abstract

Abstract Sense-making and sense-giving represent an issue of communication (Weick et al. 2005). The former is associated with emotional processes of crisisassessment and cognitive processes of justifying and seeking social acceptance for decisions (Søderberg and Vaara 2003), while the latter is the framework communicated to the public to facilitate their understanding and subsequently motivate certain actions (Maitlis and Christianson 2014). The medium used to communicate this framework varies depending on the relationship an authority figure has with their audience. Analysis of this communication and its medium has focused primarily on political leaders through the lens of the Charismatic, Ideological and Pragmatic (CIP) model (Crayne and Medeiros 2020), and of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak 2021). This study uses both the CIP model and the DHA via Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to examine influential physicians communicating the COVID-19 crisis in health podcasts in the U.S. and Australia. It therefore interprets the healthrelated information they disseminate, and how this information is framed and given meaning, to develop a perspective on how and why these podcasters differ in how they make sense of the crisis and, consequently, appeal to a broader audience.