TITLE:
Relationship between Health Provider Status and Social Interaction
AUTHORS:
Bennie Berkeley
KEYWORDS:
Health Provider Status, Sex, Social Interaction
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.4 No.7,
July
6,
2017
ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a framework for measuring the association or relationship between health provider status and social interaction with patients. It makes two assumptions. The first is that health providers engage in social interaction with patients. The second is that more involved providers have stronger relationships with patients. For example, because doctors have a significant role to play in caring for patients, they should have more interaction with patients than clerks and receptionists. Furthermore, this framework hypothesizes that: 1) health provider status is directly associated with their social interaction; and, 2) the sex of the health provider moderates the strength of this association. This conceptual framework defines three concepts: health provider status, social interaction (ordinal measures), and sex of health providers (a nominal measure). The main limitation is that the theory to be established will be restricted to one independent and one moderator variable and will be appropriate for studying the perspectives of health providers only.