A Study On Conversational Strategies Of Chinese Country Doctors With Their Patients From The Perspective Of Social Psychological Pragmatics

Conversational strategies are the techniques that help speakers to maintain conversations going smoothly and achieve the communicative goals.The interaction between doctors and patients has been a hot research topic in recent years.Previous studies on conversational strategies and on doctor-patient conversations have drawn multiple attention from various perspectives both home and abroad.However,few researches focused on Chinese country doctor-patient conversations and on the conversational strategies of Chinese country doctors in the communications with their patients before.This study focuses on three research questions: first,what conversational strategies are implemented by Chinese country doctors in communicating with their patients? Second,what social psychological functions and effects are implied in each conversational strategy on patients? Third,what is the practicality of each conversation strategy for doctors?This study investigates the conversational strategies of Chinese country doctors with their patients via adopting the method of fieldwork and empirical research to collect authentic country doctor-patient conversations and making qualitative analysis with basic quantitative analysis as supplement.The author collected 217 complete conversations between 10 Chinese country doctors aged from 35 to 45 with 217 patients.The total recording time is 6 hours and 58 minutes and 30 seconds,and the data was fully transcribed and analyzed with carefulness.The author sorted out all the conversational strategies adopted by Chinese country doctors and made clear classifications.It is found that Chinese country doctors employ 12 conversational strategies to help their patients be more cooperative in the process of diagnosis and more positive and active to the treatment,which are greeting,enquiry,instruction in diagnosis,data display,assertion,instruction after diagnosis,explanation,comparison,comforting,praise,warning,and kinship address.Moreover,instruction in diagnosis consists of two kinds which are direct instruction and instruction with request.Instruction after diagnosis consists of three types which are simple instruction,instruction with negation,and instruction with consultation.Explanation consists of four different ways which are explanation with medical knowledge,explanation with governmentpolicy,explanation with patient’s behavior,and explanation with slang.Comparison consists of two parts which are vertical comparison and horizontal comparison,and horizontal comparison is further divided into two kinds which are upward comparison and downward comparison.Additionally,each conversational strategy is interpreted through the lens of social psychological pragmatics which is a relatively new and developing theoretical perspective,and it is found that different conversational strategies observe or violate different maxims of politeness principle which is one of the theories of social psychological pragmatics and is utilized as the theoretical framework of the present paper,and embody different topical and social psychological functions and effects on patients to help to make the patients be more cooperative in the process of diagnosis and more positive and active to treatment.Moreover,different conversational strategies is needed to be utilized in different contexts for topical as well as social psychological considerations.Furthermore,the conversational strategies are not employed solely but cooperatively.The major contribution of this study are reflected in the following three aspects.First,it provides new inspirations for health professionals to communicate with their patients better and help their patients better.Second,by means of interpreting the utilization and function of the 12 conversational strategies of Chinese country doctors from the perspective of social psychological pragmatics,this study enriches the corpus basis and practical applications of this relatively new and developing approach of interpreting interactions.Third,by applying motivator of two-factor theory and social comparison theory to the interpretation of the conversational strategies,this study promotes the theoretical connotations of social psychological pragmatics.