Let’s learn how to answer various questions for the health psychology option by studying model answers to the specimen paper in this lesson!
One weakness of the study by Savage and Armstrong is the generalisability of its findings. The researchers recruited 359 participants for their sample but ended up with only 200 as a sizeable number of participants failed to complete one or both questionnaires of the study. This could reduce representativeness of the sample by introducing bias. For example, if only those participants did not complete assessments who were severely ill, then the sample would not represent the preferred consultation style of severely ill patients. This would reduce generalisability of findings to severely ill patients in the population. However, the researchers did try to mitigate the effects of attrition by recruiting a large sample to begin with and by randomly selecting from patients of each surgery doctor, which could have resulted in representation of some severely ill people at least, for instance.
One strength of the study was the use of real-settings. Actual patients who came to visit doctors in an inner London general practice were included in the study. Further, they encountered the consultation style of the doctor during the course of their actual consultation sessions with the doctor. This was as the response of the patients to the doctor’s consultation style could be presumed to be their natural response, generalisable to consultations in everyday practitioner settings. This increases the ecological validity of findings. However, ecological validity is compromised to an extent because the doctor followed prompts given by researchers to adopt a sharing or directed consultation style. Thus, patients might respond differently to doctors who authentically adopt either consultation style in real life.
One weakness of the study is its support for a deterministic explanation of patient satisfaction. The consultation style – sharing or directed – chosen by a doctor is beyond the control of the patient. This is a weakness as this explanation does not consider the choices of the patient in interaction with the doctor, which in turn could influence the style adopted by the doctor towards the patient. As an example, a doctor who adopts a sharing style, upon getting very limited responses from a patient might naturally switch over to a directed style. Thus, patients do also control their interactions with doctors and thereby, their satisfaction with them. Yet, a strength of taking a deterministic explanation is that it makes patient satisfaction predictable and controllable. For example, the result of the study which shows that directed style has an advantage in patient satisfaction over sharing style overall, makes it easy for doctors to know which style to begin with during a consultation with a new patient that will most probably result in success.