“I got a migraine and that sucked”: College Students’ Affective Stance Towards their Migraine Experiences

Vasudevan, Megha

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“I got a migraine and that sucked”: College Students’ Affective Stance Towards their Migraine Experiences

Vasudevan, Megha

Abstract

Migraines are a genetically influenced disorder and they are a common cause for disability (Ruschel & Jesus, 2023). This study seeks to examine the affective stance of college students towards their migraines. Affective stance refers to overt expressions of emotions in relation towards a particular entity to convey an emotional position in relation to that entity (Du Bois & Kärkkäinen, 2012, Kiesling 2022). Since this study was seeking to research a specific community, both participants were recruited because of their migraine experience. The findings of this study reveal that college students generally take a negative stance towards their migraine experiences, with various different emotions encoded in the stance. Further, as the researcher who is also a college student that experiences migraines, I was an interactant in these instances of stancetaking, and I use invitations to laughter and irony to align with participants and demonstrate investment in the alignment (Jefferson, 1979, Partington, 2006, Trouvain & Truong, 2017). I also use backchanneling to align. The results and the discussion reveal the heavy emotional toll that the physical aspect of the migraines takes on college students. The findings of this study highlight a weakness of the social model of disability, namely that the model often overly focuses on social barriers to define disability, instead of factoring in the impairment as it relates to disability, as the impairment is not always neutral to disabled people’s lived experiences (Shakespeare, 2017, Crow, 1992).