What Providers Seek to Do with ‘Questions’ in Patient-Provider Interaction

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes patient-provider interaction (PPI). More precisely, it deals with the form-function relationship in questions used in counselor-patient interaction. The study is based on naturally occurring primary data collected at the Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Community Medicine, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital (JNMCH), located in Aligarh Muslim University, India. The data are composed of audio-visual recordings of Hindi-Urdu interaction between 8 counselors and 27 patients. We identified compliance and condescension as the two unique functions the counselors seeks to accomplish and/or fulfill through the use of questions in their interaction with the patients. We also found four other functions – information seeking, recall, greeting, and diagnosis, which are sought by the counselors through their use of questions. The findings also suggest that these functions maintain and promote what can be termed as a counselor-centered interaction, and thus reflect asymmetrical power relationship between counselors and their patients.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Prof. Mohd. Shahid from D/o Social Work, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad who has gone through earlier versions of this paper and has made valuable suggestions. The authors also extend their thanks to Prof. H. Ashraf, Convener Institutional Ethics Committee, Prof. S. Bano, Dean Faculty of Medicine, AMU Aligarh Prof. Zulfia Khan, Chairperson D/o Community Medicine, Prof. Syed Manazir Ali Chairperson D/o Pediatrics AMU Aligarh for their help in data collection for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] the tables.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.