Information Giving in Medical Care

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Abstract
Information giving is a crucial element of medical care. Two theoretically grounded hypotheses were considered. Doctors may withhold information and maintain uncertainty to preserve power in the doctor-patient relationship. Class-based sociolinguistic differences in language use may create further inpediments to information giving. A multivariate research model was operationalized to study these hypotheses and to assess other associations between information giving and the characteristics of doctors, patients and the clinical situations in which they interact. An analysis of a sample of 336 encounters recorded from several outpatients settings revealed that doctors spent little time informing their patients, overestimated the time they did spend and underestimated patients'' desire for information. Contingency-table analysis showed that information transmittal was associated with doctors'' income, social class background, political ideology and perceptions of patients'' informative needs; patients'' age, sex, social class, education and prognosis; and situational characteristics such as the length of acquaintance, numbers of patients seen per day and the types of patients in the doctor''s practices. Multiple regression nalysis assessed the relative importance of these variables in explaining the variation in information transmittal. A relationship among information withholding, uncertainty and power was not clearly confirmed. The importance of class-based sociolinguistic barriers to communication was clarified.

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