The Uncertainty Reducing Capabilities of Primary Care Physicians’ Video Biographies for Choosing a New Doctor: Is a Video Worth More Than Two Hundred Words?

ABSTRACT

Choosing a primary care physician for the first time is an important decision, one that health care systems do not make particularly easy for prospective patients to make solely through the limited information provided on their websites. Without knowledge from others, a new patient is likely to have uncertainty about the physician he or she chooses. Three hundred and twenty participants completed an online experiment and were exposed to two biographies of different doctors with different media and either professional or personal information. Predictions generated by media richness theory revealed greater reductions in uncertainty for video biographies than traditional text biographies. Video biographies, and those containing personal information about the physician, were also related to higher levels of anticipated patient satisfaction and care quality. When asked to choose the physicians they would want to visit, participants overwhelmingly chose the physician with whom they perceived the greatest similarity to themselves, as well as the doctor who provided a video biography. Both theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.

Funding

This research was supported with funding from the College of Communication Arts & Sciences and the Graduate School of Michigan State University.

Notes

¹ The biographies can be provided by the corresponding author upon request.

² Full scale items are available from the corresponding author upon request.

³ As an added level of rigor, the analyses for hypotheses 1–4 were also conducted separately for each of the two physicians, and the same findings were discovered as when the analyses were run with the physician conditions collapsed.

⁴ Because, as previously noted, the medium manipulation also had an impact on perceived similarity, the analyses for hypotheses 2, 3, and 4 testing similarity’s impact on the DVs were run within the text and video conditions separately. Also, analyses testing the medium’s impact on the DVs were run within the personal and professional conditions separately. All analyses revealed similar significant differences (p < .05), except when testing similarity’s impact on care quality only within the video condition. While in the right direction, the mean difference between the personal (M = 5.73) and professional (M = 5.43) biographies in the video condition did not reach significance (p = .076).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported with funding from the College of Communication Arts & Sciences and the Graduate School of Michigan State University.