1,304
Views
18
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

Trust Me, I Am a Doctor: Discourse of Trustworthiness by Chinese Doctors in Online Medical Consultation

&
Pages 372-380 | Published online: 18 Nov 2019
 

ABSTRACT

As a key notion in medical consultation, trustworthiness has been the attention of an array of research, focusing on its significance for the patient-doctor alliance as well as the success of communication in between. Despite its importance, scant effort has been made previously about the actual discourse through which trustworthiness is achieved, in particular for online medical consultation in Chinese. The aim of this research is to investigate the linguistic structures of Chinese doctors’ narratives for trustworthiness construction in online medical consultation. We use the Internet-based dataset collected from 120 ask.com. It is found that doctors’ trustworthiness discourse can be categorized into two types: authoritative discourse and attitudinal discourse, with the former specifically realized by expertise-oriented discourse through medical jargon and experience-oriented discourse with the help of individual experience and collective experience, and the latter by including affection-oriented discourse through doctors’ respect for patients, behavior-oriented discourse by means of doctors’ avoidance of imposition on patients and cognition-oriented discourse with the aid of doctors’ disagreements. Meanwhile, detailed linguistic and para-linguistic means to realize these discourses are analyzed to offer some insights into the appropriate discourses of trustworthiness for the doctors both online and offline in Chinese medical consultation scenario.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Science Project funded by Ministry of Education under grant [17YJAZH061].

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access

  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 53.00 Add to cart

Issue Purchase

  • 30 days online access to complete issue
  • Article PDFs can be downloaded
  • Article PDFs can be printed
USD 371.00 Add to cart

* Local tax will be added as applicable

Related Research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.