Strategies of persuasion in offers to participate in cancer clinical trials I: Topic placement and topic framing
Issue: Vol 11 No. 1 (2014)
Journal: Communication & Medicine
Subject Areas: Healthcare Communication Linguistics
Abstract:
Clinical trials are the gold standard in medical research evaluating new treatments in cancer care; however, in the United States, too few patients enroll in clinical trials, particularly patients from minority groups. Offering patients the option of a clinical trial is an ethically-charged communicative event for oncologists. One particularly vexed ethical issue is the use of persuasion in offers to participate in clinical trials. Based on a corpus of 22 oncology encounters with Caucasian-American (n=11) and African-American (n=11) patients, this discourse analysis describes oncologists’ use of two persuasive strategies related to the linguistic structure of the encounter—topic placement and topic framing. Findings are presented in total and by patient race, and discussed in terms of whether these strategies may constitute ethical or unethical persuasion, particularly with respect to the ethical issue of undue influence and the social issue of underrepresentation of minorities in cancer clinical trials.
Author: Ellen Barton, Susan Eggly, Andrew Winckles, Terrance L. Albrecht
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