Physician executives' persuasive styles of communication in upward influence situations

This article examines the communicator style choices of physician executives when attempting to persuade a superior whose own style of communication is attractive and unattractive. In the November-December 1990 issue of Physician Executive, the author reported on persuasive strategies physician executives use to influence such targets of influence. Whereas the earlier study focused on what physician executives communicate to be persuasive, the present investigation treated the way physician executives communicate to persuade attractive and unattractive superiors. The results suggest that the way physician executives communicate in upward influence situations is affected by the way their superiors communicate with them.     

Physician perceptions of medical malpractice and defensive medicine

Using judgments obtained in interviews with 33 Massachusetts physicians, the annual statewide volume of expenditures incurred for defensive medical reasons in 1982 was estimated to be $1.0 billion, 12% of all medical care expenditures. Estimates for the nation were $37 billion, 14% of expenditures. Nationally, 180,000 cesarean deliveries were thought to be performed for defensive motives. In their own institutions, respondents judged 43% of all skull x-rays following injury to be medically justified, 30% to be defensive medicine, 16% to be placebos, and 11% to be physician misjudgments. In considering the economic and noneconomic costs of medical malpractice procedures, the dollar costs of insurance were considered most serious, followed closely by defensive medicine, unfairness, and poorer relations with patients. Thirty-two percent of the responsibility for the negative aspects of malpractice processes was assigned to lawyers, 21% to physicians, 18% to legislatures and courts, 16% to patients, and 13% to insurance companies.     

Eye-contact as a chance product of individual looking: Implications for the intimacy model of argyle and dean

From time to time during social encounters, people look at one another in the region of the eyes, and sometimes their eyes meet to make eye-contact. According to Argyle and Dean (1965), eye-contact in dyadic encounters signals the intimacy of the interaction and is controlled largely by the competing approach and avoidance forces that motivate the pair. In the present paper, new analyses are reported of three published experiments that were designed originally to test aspects of the intimacy model and it is shown that the duration of eye-contact is no more than a chance product of how long the two subjects look individually. Looking and not eye-contact, it is argued, should be the basis for models of visual interaction, and the intimacy model is ill-founded conceptually; the role of emotion in gaze has been overstressed at the expense of the concept of information; and the most important aspect of vision is in any case not looking and eye-contact but visual access to the whole person. The more cueless the encounter—that is, the fewer the social cues from vision and all the other senses combined—the greater the psychological distance; and the greater the psychological distance, the more task-oriented and depersonalized the content of what people say and, in turn, the less spontaneous their style of speech and the less likely a debate to end in compromise.Research for this article was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain.     

An analysis of cyclically dense data using EBLOC

Everett (1982a) has proposed a graph theoretic technique for analysing social networks. It is not usually possible to apply this method to data which contain a large number of interlocking cycles. We demonstrate a technique which overcomes this problem by referring to the data analysed by MacRae (1960).     

Mental health services for Chinese in a community health center

Serious mental health problems exist within the Chinese population of the United States. This article describes one center's attempt to meet the psychiatric needs of both nonpsychotic and psychotic Chinese patients through bilingual, culturally relevant treatments.     

Bicol hospital reaches out to rural folk

The Ago General Hospital in Legaspi City of the Philippines was opened in 1965, antedating the national family planning movement by 5 years. The 180 bed hospital integrates family planning into the overall hospital service; sterilization is the main method used. Of the 3600 patients per year, 15% are family planning acceptors. The hospital employs 3 family planning strategies: inhospital, out patient and supportive. Inhospital strategies center on sterilization counseling and motivation. The counseling sessions include patient education. Primary targets include high risk pregnancies and young couples with a lot of children. Outpatient strategies include a referral system involving hospitals and agencies with family planning programs, lectures for community organizations and personal visits to other clinics and rural health units. The hospital's mobile clinic, staffed mainly by students, provides information, deworming, and pediatric services to the community. Supportive program strategies consist of mass communication, and an acceptor's club for previous acceptors of sterilization. These clubs meet regularly to share and discuss experiences.     

Outreach: helping achieve coordination in the field

The outreach officials of the National Population Program of the Philippines, with its 4 basic functions of research, training, information-education-communication, and clinic services, are trying to solve pressing problems which have been an outgrowth of developments of the early 1970s when population and family planning concepts were integrated into other government programs. Given the task of attacking these problems and coordinating the whole program was the newly organized Commission on Population (Popcom). The organizations which had their own programs cooperated with the government agencies. Initially thought of as workable, the early strategy was soon found to be inadequate, and in July 1975, Popcom implemented an integrated development approach in population work. The strategy is complex, and as it undergoes refinement, the program may well profit from the experiences or lessions gained by a number of agencies in carrying out population/development activities. The approach used by the Office of Nonformal Education of the Philippines Rural Reconstruction Movement is seen as potentially helpful to the outreach project in developing 3 types of leadership in order to properly integrate or link private and public agencies, and ensure a continuing development program: political, educational, and technical. It is stressed that outsiders can help, but it is the community which must basically do the job themselves. So different government technicians are trained so that they can effectively train other people from the community, and do it in such a way that the program will be continuing and self-releasing.