Gender Differences In Doctor-patient Dialogues: A Conversation Analytic Approach

In China, the social relationship between doctors and patients is not very satisfying. Civilians complain about the unsatisfactory medical care service, while the medical workers complain about misunderstanding and distrust of patients. Disputes often happen. Doctor-patient dialogue is a special institutional talk. The diagnostic process is achieved through language communication. Whether the conversation is successful or not matters a lot. As we know the relationship between language and gender is very intimate. Among the various factors determining the on-goings of doctor-patient dialogues and their relationship, gender difference is singled out to be investigated into this study.The present study took the conversational analytic approach to analyze the data collected from one ordinary level hospital and one higher level hospital in Changchun, China. It discussed gender differences in doctor-patient dialogues from two main aspects. First, the differences of the linguistic features of male and female doctor talks in their dialogues with their patients, male and female respectively are found out; and such kind of differences makes us feel that the atmosphere of talking to female doctor is more harmonious than talking to male doctors. Second, we use conversational analytic approach to study the structure and organization of doctor-patient conversations based on the data. We find that different kinds of talk have their own structures and patterns in terms of overall organization and local organization. And structure differences occur in terms of cross-gender differences among doctors and patients. Two main reasons are put forward to explain why these differences happen; one is domination and subordination; the other one is man and woman have been raised in different sociolinguistic sub-cultures, so cross-cultural communication may become tough owning to the gender-related language behavior.This study is a relatively comprehensive research of gender differences in doctor-patient dialogue. We get different conversational structures according to the gender of the doctors and patients. These differences suggest that doctors should regulate their own words according to the patients'gender to enhance the communicative efficiency, especially for the cross-sex doctor-patient communication. If the phenomenon of gender differences in doctor-patient communication is given more attention, the effectiveness of the communication may be improved.