Patients' Disalignment in Two Different Healthcare Settings

Area of Science:

• Healthcare communication
• Sociolinguistics
• Medical sociology

Background:

• Research often focuses on patient adherence to medical recommendations.
• Studies show patient-practitioner interactions involve negotiation, impacting compliance.
• Less explored are patient strategies for disalignment with non-medication advice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze patient interactional resources for expressing disalignment with non-medication recommendations.
• To investigate patient roles in general and mental health settings.
• To compare direct and interpreter-mediated communication, considering linguistic and cultural diversity.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of audio- and video-recorded naturally occurring data from Italy and France.
• Focus on interactional resources used by patients to signal disalignment.
• Multimodal analysis incorporating non-verbal cues.
• Examination of interpreter-mediated communication dynamics.

Main Results:

• Patients utilize diverse interactional resources to express disalignment with non-medication advice.
• Patient disalignment and practitioner responses vary across healthcare settings.
• Interpreter-mediated communication presents unique challenges in conveying nuanced patient stances.
• Multimodal analysis reveals subtle interactional dynamics missed in text-only analysis.

Conclusions:

• Patients play a central role in negotiating healthcare recommendations beyond medication.
• Understanding patient disalignment strategies is crucial for effective healthcare communication.
• Multimodal and interpreter-mediated communication analysis enhances insights into patient-practitioner dynamics.
• Cultural and linguistic diversity requires careful consideration in healthcare interactions.