Patient Evaluation of International Medical Graduates’ Verbal and Nonverbal Strategies to Manage Their Lack of Comprehension: Investigating the Role of Goal Inferences
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Guided by goal understanding theory, we investigated how U.S. patients evaluate communication strategies international medical graduates (IMGs) adopt to manage their lack of comprehension of patient idioms. Participants ( N = 569) watched a video of an IMG and a patient interacting in a 3 (verbal: being blunt, feigning comprehension, providing rationale) × 2 (nonverbal: higher, lower immediacy) × 2 (message variations: “out of sorts,” “frog in the throat”) online experiment. Participants inferred IMG goals of understanding the patient and establishing trust most strongly when IMGs provided rationale with higher nonverbal immediacy and least strongly when IMGs feigned comprehension with lower nonverbal immediacy. These inferred goals were positively associated with participants’ evaluations of IMGs and their satisfaction. The findings suggest that patients may integrate verbal and nonverbal behaviors to infer IMGs’ goals, yielding implications for goals theorizing and IMG communication.
期刊介绍:
Empirical research in communication began in the 20th century, and there are more researchers pursuing answers to communication questions today than at any other time. The editorial goal of Communication Research is to offer a special opportunity for reflection and change in the new millennium. To qualify for publication, research should, first, be explicitly tied to some form of communication; second, be theoretically driven with results that inform theory; third, use the most rigorous empirical methods; and fourth, be directly linked to the most important problems and issues facing humankind. Critieria do not privilege any particular context; indeed, we believe that the key problems facing humankind occur in close relationships, groups, organiations, and cultures.