DISPLAYING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND EMERGENT INTERACTIONAL TROUBLES IN STANDARDISED PATIENT-MEDICAL STUDENT INTERACTION

Previous research on medical interaction has shown that there is a link between effective doctor-patient interaction and success in medical services (Drew, Chatwin ve Collins, 2001). In relation to this, there are now a growing number of studies on doctor-patient interaction in medical education, and many universities in the world have started using communication training and samples of “standardised patients-medical student” interactions in order to help students understand clinical encounters. In this paper, preliminary findings based on a database of standardised patient-medical student interactions in a Turkish university will be presented. The data comes from a video corpus of 71 simulated patient-medical student interactions. The study employs a Conversation Analysis methodology, investigating participants’ verbal and non-verbal contributions in talk from micro-analytic and sequential perspectives. One of the phenomena that emerged from the database is the interactional trouble that emerges once a medical student displays previous knowledge on a patient’s case. The findings show that after such displays of knowledge, interactional troubles including repair sequences, long silences, and attempts to terminate on-going talk emerge. These findings may have contributions for developing training programmes in Turkey and beyond, as they point us to interactional troubles that are important in medical communication.