Analyzing the physician-patient interaction: An overview of six methods and future research directions

The six research teams highlighted in this special issue of Health Communic ation were concerned with developing a methodologically sound and theoretic ally heuristic coding scheme to document the provider-patient interaction, and all articles coded the same set of provider-patient interactions. In th is article, I first summarize the similarities and differences among the si x articles and then raise two fundamental questions that are designed to st imulate further research in the field.