The evaluation and measurement of physician and patient communication

This project demonstrates a research method to measure and investigate the nature of the communication signals between two cooperating individuals, a physician and a patient (or caregiver) in a specified environment. Each of the cooperating individuals are involved with one another in a medical clinic for "well-baby" care and are preserved on video-tape for analysis. The interaction was coded and digitized from the recorded video-tape by a method to be known as the HIP4 (Hogan Interactional Profile of Physician-Patient Performance).;The dichotomized signals from the HIP4 vectors allowed mean activity scores to be generated for 44% (N = 35) of the (N = 80) HIP4 vectors. Anova results of the HIP4 communication template of behavior indicate significant differences were found to exist in the mean activity scores for communication signals (F = 15.9, d.f. = 11,188, p ;Multiple comparisons were subsequently completed to identify the location of significant relationships. In addition Pearson product moment correlations were calculated for the activity scores across active vectors. A "Data-Myte" digicoder was used to preserve verbal and non-verbal behaviors of communicants.;Spectral density coefficients were generated from the HIP4 for 100 individual frequencies, up to and including the Nyquist frequency, of the interaction for each of the active variables. These coefficients were hypothesized to be no different than the coefficients of white noise as indicated with the Komolmogorov-Smirnov Probability ratio.;Several behavioral scores for the physician and patient's communication signals were found and classified as stochastic and not associated with HIP4 variables that were active. Nonverbal behaviors are treated as communication vectors and were found to be associated to the amount of information transmitted between the physician and the patient.