Establishing mutual understanding in online medical advice

Speaker
Regina Jucks and Rainer Bromme
Educational Psychology, University of Muenster

When
-

Where
Wean Hall 4623

Description

Asking “cyberdoctors” via email for medical advice is a popular way to obtain information on health topics. Beyond the difficulties that might arise when physicians explain medical issues to laypersons, giving online medical advice is especially challenging, because the medical experts hardly know anything about the inquiring patients. How do medical experts adapt their answers to certain features of patients’ inquiries?

A phenomenon of adaptation well documented in face-to-face communication is the standardization of vocabulary in conversation, referred to as lexical entrainment or lexical alignment. Study 1 was conducted to investigate whether lexical entrainment can be found in written net-based communication between experts and laypersons. Medical experts (n = 46) answered to patients’ queries on health problems. Language technicality was manipulated. One version contained medical concepts in everyday language (e.g. obesity), the other in technical language (adiposity). Do experts adapt their replies to the vocabulary in the inquiry? Analyses provide evidence of the lexical entrainment phenomenon. Furthermore, semantic analyses show that experts adapt the content of their answers to the technicality of the inquiry, providing more explanations, essential facts and behavioural tips in their replies to inquiries written in medical everyday language than to inquiries written in medical technical language.

A second study was conducted in order to test if theobserved response patterns could be explained with regard to experts’ conscious assumptions about laypersons’ knowledge. N = 68 medical experts were provided with a content-specific knowledge assessment questionnaire. More knowledge was ascribed to laypersons solely concerning issues treated in the enquiry. Beyond that, no differences in knowledge ascription were found. The results suggest that the variations in experts’ semantic and lexical decisions are not caused by experts’ explicit assumptions about the laypersons’ knowledge, but are triggered “directly” by the laypersons’ language use. The findings of our studies are discussed with respect to their implications for health counseling.

Speaker's Bio

Regina (Ina) Jucks is Assistant Professor at the University of Muenster, Department for Educational Psychology. She received a diploma in Psychology in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Psychology in 2001. Her Ph.D. thesis was on computer-expert’s capability of perspective taking with regard to layperson’s views and to layperson’s understanding of computer related texts. She is interested in analyzing how systematic knowledge divergences, like those that occur between experts and layperson, do influence communication effectiveness. Her current research focuses on issues of adaptation processes in online-discourses, on text comprehension and on intervention methods for the improvement of communication among experts and laypersons.

Rainer Bromme holds a chair of Educational Psychology at the University of Muenster. (Educational psychology is one of the compulsory elements for a masters degree in Psychology in Germany). He is a faculty member in the German Virtual Ph.D. program “Knowledge Acquisition and Knowledge Exchange with New Media” (www.vgk.de). He studied Psychology at the University of Muenster (diploma 1975), achieved doctor’s degree in 1979 at Oldenburg University and the “Venia Legendi” for Psychology (Habilitation 1989) at the University of Bielefeld. From 1979 until 1990 he was senior researcher in the Institut für Didaktik der Mathematik (a national research institute on Mathematics Education at the University of Bielefeld). His research interests include cognition and teaching/learning processes, especially related to the:

communication and cooperation between experts and laypersons,
development of professional expertise,
learning with New Media,
the development of knowledge and understanding in Science and Mathematics.

Host
Carolyn P. Rose