An Expectation States Approach to Examining Medical Team Information Exchange

This project is the first step in a long line of research that will examine the impact of status on information exchange in small groups of medical professionals. Specifically, we employ the expectation states theory and observable power and prestige methodology to develop a coding scheme and live coding methodology that is attuned to the unique status organizing process in interprofessional medical teams.

This paper begins with an explanation of the shortcomings in current research that examines medical teams. We then discuss the conceptual development of the coding scheme and methodology. Next, we establish reliability between live coders and between the transcript coders. We conclude by employing our coding scheme to examine how occupational status (physician vs. nurse) operates in medical teams, and find that our scheme possesses both criterion and face validity. Future steps include increasing our sample size to have more statistical power in detecting status differences and dropping some items from the coding scheme to increase reliability.