Demographic questions in telephone calls to a cancer information service

Questions are discourse forms that lead to structured short‐term outcomes/constrained responsive answers. The present essay describes one routine component of telephone calls to the Cancer Information Service, a moment at which CIS information specialists, for purposes of program evaluation, ask callers a series of demographic questions. These demographic questions permit few options. We discuss outcomes of these questions in terms of (1) delivering health care inforamtion, and (2) describing types of qulestions and answers in conversational interactions.