Advance care planning is built upon starting conversations about ageing, illness and the end of life. So too is research in this field. In an Australian study about Vietnamese migrants’ responses to planning ahead for aged and end-of-life care, research participants called into question this direct approach to communication. Attempting to destabilise the dominance of Anglophone approaches to advance care planning and, moreover, to research in this area, we employ the Vietnamese linguistic device of ‘softening hedges’ both as an analytic lens and as a methodological tool to engage participants in research about a sensitive and often taboo topic. Creating distance from the individual – as decision-maker or as research participant – we worked closely with research collaborators, enabling new visual and bilingual methods to emerge.
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