Assessment,Objectivity,and Interaction: The Case of Patient Compliance With Medical Treatment Regimens

Much of the daily work of professional organizations is accomplished via interaction between representatives of those institutions and laypeople. Scholars of talk in institutional settings have argued that lay-professional interaction is often assumed mistakenly to operate as a neutral conduit for professionals to gain information relevant to their work. I use the case of doctor-patient interaction to examine how patient compliance with diabetes treatment is assessed in interaction. Despite the abundance of research on patient compliance, the approaches to this work show a conceptual uniformity stemming from the notion that noncompliance is a matter of individually based, essential behaviors. Using conversation analysis, I draw attention to the ways in which compliance is produced jointly in and through institutional talk. As a result, I seek to elaborate two extant literatures: interdisciplinary research on patient compliance as an aspect of health behavior, and social psychological literature on attitudes and behavior.