Silent Partners in Medical Care: A Cross-Cultural Study of Patient Participation

Cultural diversity in patient participation: The influence of patients’ characteristics and doctors’ communicative behaviour

“…21]. Studies on crosscultural differences in communicative behaviour have also yielded evidence that non-Westerners are actually less assertive and direct in their conversations than Westerners [22,23], adding more direct evidence to our hypothesis that ethnic minority patients of non-Western backgrounds will be less active participants during medical visits than white patients. Therefore, we propose that intercultural medical consultations are characterised by both less active patient participation and less encouraging physician utterances than intra-cultural medical consultations.…”

Can patients’ preferences for involvement in decision-making regarding the use of medicines be predicted?

“…Social class [15] and educational level [4,6,7,[10][11][12][13][14]16,[19][20][21] have been reported to be associated with preferences for involvement in decision-making in a variety of settings. A relationship between race/ethnic group and preferences for involvement has been demonstrated by some studies [17,[22][23][24]. However, study methodology has not always reflected the complexities of ethnic group classification systems.…”

Active recruitment and limited participant-load related to high participation in large population-based biobank studies

“…Cultural factors might explain why Asian populationebased biobank studies have higher participation rates than North American and European studies. In comparison with Westerners, Asians seem to be more collectively oriented [56,57], which might lead to the higher participation rates. The higher participation rates in Oceania compared to Europe and North America are harder to explain, as New Zealand, where both studies from Oceania were based, may be considered predominantly Western.…”