Coaxing and Coaching: Teaching Medical Students to Effect an Authoritative Demeanor in Patient Interactions

• In Event: 322 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 14. Medical Education II

Abstract

Due to the social and interpersonal authority of physicians, medical education has long been a focus of sociological study. Past approaches have examined the social function of professionalization, the student cultures that are sustained in professional schools, and the social-psychological processes that accompany socialization. This paper will develop a practice-oriented approach to medical socialization as a response to the dominance of the social-psychological approach. This approach is advantageous because it draws from ethnographic field data that track the socialization process in student-faculty interactions, thereby showing the role of faculty members in medical student socialization. It emerges that faculty members are not, as earlier approaches have presented them, distant and authoritarian figures. Rather, they are intimately involved with the students as they learn to interact with patients. These faculty members coax and coach the students out of their uncertainty and show the students, through story and example, how to act authoritatively in clinical situations.

Author

• Alexandra Hope Vinson, University of California-San Diego