Listening to patients’ voices: Linguistic indicators related to diabetes self-management

Abstract

A great deal of research in health care has examined a wide range of variables to better understand the degree to which patients follow the advice of medical professionals in managing their health, known as adherence. This paper explains the development of the linguistic systems to describe and evaluate two psychosocial constructs (i.e. control orientation and agency) that have been found to be related to adherence in previous research for subjects with diabetes (Trento et al. 2007; Wangberg 2007; O’Hea et al. 2009). The present data came from 43 semi-structured in-depth interviews of subjects with Type 2 diabetes. One-on-one interviews with open-ended questions elicited subjects’ ‘stories’ about living with diabetes, and the transcribed interviews were analyzed to develop the linguistic systems of control orientation and agency. The resultant systems were applied to the 43 interviews by raters with high inter-rater reliability. The results showed demarcations of clearly identified codings of patient types. The paper presents the linguistic coding systems developed in the study, the results of their application to the patient interview data, and recommendations for improved communication with patients.

The ambiguity of preparing and being prepared for a patient consultation

“…In general, the existing literature tends to focus on the training of physicians rather than other health professionals. For example, two studies found an improvement in physicians' communication skills following their participation in an intervention program (Griffin et al 2004;Rao et al 2007), while others revealed that training physicians to communicate better helped patients engage with treatment (Zolnierek and DiMatteo 2009;Connor et al 2012). Research conducted by Teutsch (2003) had an explicit focus on the components of effective physician-patient communication; these were identified as setting a good tone, interpreting communication cues accurately and active listening.…”

Health Literacy and Adults With Low Basic Skills

“…A future area of research could be within the framework of a corpus-based study of health discourse, an emerging and exploratory research process that would allow for both qualitative and quantitative analysis (Cortes, 2015). Opportunities to develop interventions could result from understanding the openness of each individual conversation or understanding how grammatical speech functions (e.g., use of first-and second-person pronouns) affect individual agency in conversation (Connor et al, 2012). It would be valuable to profile patients by adherence to their medication and discharge instructions to understand if patient or provider speech patterns affect adherence.…”