Encouraging patient adherence: primary care physicians’ use of verbal compliance-gaining strategies in medical interviews

Compliance-gaining strategies refer to subtle differences in ways people use language when their goal is to influence someone else’s behavior. This stands in contrast to other kinds of persuasion aimed only at influencing others beliefs and attitudes. We have developed a new method of coding what physicians say when they are trying to influence patients’ behaviors. This method applies theory and methods from the fields of interpersonal influence, linguistics and social psychology. We tested the reliability of this new method by randomly selecting 37 audiotaped medical interviews collected for an unrelated study [J. Gen. Int. Med., 9 (1994) 402] and having three coders independently identify physician compliance-gaining utterances and then independently apply one of 57 codes to each utterance. These codes also were categorized on two underlying dimensions reflecting whether the physician (1) framed the compliance-gaining utterance in a direct or indirect way, and (2) did or did not give a justification for that direct or indirect request. Reliability among coders and coders agreement with the final utterance identification and coding decisions, measured as per cent agreement among coders and/or, where appropriate, by Cohen’s κ were good to excellent. Most physicians’ strategies were indirect and incomplete. For female patients, physicians used significantly more strategies, including more indirect strategies, complete strategies, “prescriptions” and “demands”. For male patients, physicians used a greater percent of direct strategies, including “procedural demands”. This method provides a reliable and promising new technique for observing naturally occurring physician compliance-gaining speech.