THE DYADIC EFFECT OF COMMUNICATION APPREHENSION - THEORETICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Students in a required pharmacy communication course were administered the PRCA-24 (Personal Report of Communication Apprehension), which is a valid measure of state-like and trait-like communication apprehensi on, and assigned two pharmacist roles and two patient roles. Students choose their own partners for this graded (0-100) videotaped assignmen t. Student ''pharmacists'' must counsel student ''patients'' about a p articular drug. The ''patient'' can then give the ''pharmacist'' feedb ack as to how he/she did, at which time the ''pharmacist'' may decide if he/she wants to repeat the counseling session. After the first assi gnment was graded, extensive feedback was given to each ''pharmacist'' and a second assignment is then completed. The purpose of this study was to examine if there are any dyadic effects associated with communi cation apprehension (CA). Is the counseling performance of the ''pharm acist'' affected not only by the CA of the ''pharmacist,'' but also by the CA of the ''patient''? Students were recorded as high, medium or low CA using the 75th and 25th percentiles. The results (N=42 pairs) i ndicated that there was no significant difference between the assignme nt scores of high, low or medium CA's individually. There was generall y significant pairwise dependence within the role play dyads. The grad es of one student on both assignments and the improvement between assi gnments are positively correlated with the scores of the student partn er. However, using the pooled regression techniques of Kenny indicated that high CA's in the H-H dyads scored significantly worse on assignm ent 1 (P<0.05) than any other individuals within pairs, indicating a m ajor dyadic effect. Moreover, when focusing on improvement between the two assignments, the H-H dyads showed the most significant increase c ompared to other dyads (P<0.05). The L-L pair showed no increase. This pattern has major pedagogical implications.