AFFECTIVE ORIENTATION: ITS ROLE IN COMPLIANCE-GAINING IN PHYSICIAN-PATIENT AND NURSE-PATIENT INTERACTIONS.
Contributors: University of Kentucky.
Published: 1996
Number of pages: 98
Subjects: Speech Communication.; Health Sciences, Medicine and Surgery.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: This investigation focuses on the Affective Orientation (AO) construct and its relationship to profession and compliance-gaining strategies within the health care context. Two studies were performed. The first investigates and establishes the connection between affect and compliance-gaining strategies. The results of this study indicate which compliance-gaining strategies are high in affect, which are low in affect, and which are undifferentiated. The results also indicated that when physicians demonstrate affect during the medical interview, patients prefer a high level of affect to a low level of affect. Participants reported believing more often that the physicians (both male and female) in high affect scenarios are competent, caring, and interested in their patients.

Another important finding of the first study is that patients intend to take prescribed medication regardless of their level of satisfaction with the medical interview. It appears that dissatisfied patients may initially intend to take prescribed medications and later decide not to take them or feel less motivated to take them.

The second study investigates physicians' and nurses' AO levels, comparing the AO levels across both profession and gender, and compliance-gaining strategies used. These results demonstrate that physicians are significantly lower in AO as a group than are nurses and that males are significantly lower in AO as a group than are females (who tend to divide equally between high and low AO). Further, the health care professionals who participated in this study are significantly lower in AO than populations previously sampled (primarily undergraduate students). The standard deviation for these participants was approximately half that of earlier studies. This suggests that not only are the health care providers significantly lower in AO but they are also a distinctly homogeneous group in their affective orientation.

This research is important in several ways. A health care provider's choices for compliance-gaining strategies shed light on the relationship between attitudes/perceptions of behavior and actual behavior. A second area of important implications concerns the relationship between personality attributes (such as AO) and attitudes or perceptions of behavior.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-09, Section: A, page: 3749.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY, 1996.

School code: 0102.