Assessment, Objectivity, and Interaction: The Case of
Patient Compliance With Medical Treatment Regimens
Karen Lutfey
Abstract
Much of the daily work of professional organizations is accomplished via interaction
between representatives of those institutions and laypeople. Scholars of talk in institutional
settings have argued that lay-professional interaction is often assumed mistakenly
to operate as a neutral conduit for professionals to gain information relevant to their
work. I use the case of doctor-patient interaction to examine how patient compliance
with diabetes treatment is assessed in interaction. Despite the abundance of research on
patient compliance, the approaches to this work show a conceptual uniformity stemming
from the notion that noncompliance is a matter of individually based, essential
behaviors. Using conversation analysis, I draw attention to the ways in which compliance
is produced jointly in and through institutional talk. As a result, I seek to elaborate
two extant literatures: interdisciplinary research on patient compliance as an aspect of
health behavior, and social psychological literature on attitudes and behavior.
|
