The number of words spoken by male doctors and male and female patients in a sample of British general practitioner-patient consultations

Abstract

Objective - To investigate the relationship of the amount of words spoken by general practitioners and patients to the main topics of the consultations and the sex of the patients.

Design, setting and subjects - Sample of 60 face-to-face doctor-patient consultations, with five different doctors and 60 different patients, randomly chosen from a database of British general practitioner-patient consultations. All the doctors were male; 33 patients were female, 27 male.

Main outcome measures - Number of words spoken by doctors and patients, related to sex of patients and the consultations' main topics. Results - There was no significant difference in the overall amount of words spoken by doctors and patients. However, doctors uttered significantly more words than their patients in those consultations in which the main topic was somatic, while patients spoke significantly more words than their doctors in those consultations in which the main topic was psychosocial.

Conclusions - The main topics of the consultations were more important than the sex of the patients with regard to the proportion of words uttered by doctors and by patients.

Key Words:

• consultation
• verbosity
• discourse analysis
• sodolin-guistics
• social psychology
• sex
• topic