Nurse religiosity and relational control

As a means of introduction to my new blog, I am posting the abstract of the poster I will be presenting next month at the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare http://www.aachonline.org/programs/internationalconference/ I will try to post a pdf of the poster itself once it is finalized.

The impact of nurses’ religiosity on their willingness to relinquish relational control in conversations with patients about end-of-life care

Introduction - Nurses and physicians are taught to approach communication in the clinical setting in a task-oriented manner, but discussions about certain topics such as end-of-life care may bring up personal religious values. The study attempts to examine how religious beliefs may influence patterns of communication in the clinical environment. The study was grounded by relational control theory, which says that conversation partners assert control through patterns of conversation indicating who is in charge. Previous studies indicate it is helpful for patients to have some control of conversations, but medical providers do not always relinquish control.

Hypothesis – It is hypothesized that nurses that are higher in intrinsic religiosity will be more willing to relinquish control. Clinician empathy is expected to be an intervening variable, diminishing the impact of intrinsic religiosity on willingness to relinquish control.

Method – An online census survey was administered to the graduate students in the school of nursing at a Midwestern university. The survey was designed to measure: relational control, as measured by the subscales of dominance and task orientation in Burgoon and Hale’s scale of relational communication; clinician empathy, as measured by the Jefferson scale of clinician empathy; and intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, whether religious views are held for deep personal reasons or social reasons, as measured by the Maltby and Lewis scale, designed for religious and non-religious samples. Data were analyzed using multiple regressions and one-way ANOVAs.

Results and Implications – Intrinsic religiosity and empathy were both associated with the willingness to relinquish relational control in certain contexts. Many clinicians with intrinsic religious beliefs are willing to let patients guide their own care. Some respondents struggled with the language used on the relational control scales, so future research should consider different methods and language sensitive to the clinical culture to measure relational control in clinician-patient interactions.