McKinlay (1975)

Aims:

To assess the understanding of 13 technical terms in a maternity ward by lower-class women.

Procedures:

Study conducted on British obstetricians and gynaecologists, who used medial jargon during interviews with women in a maternity ward.

The patients were read each word, heard it in the context of a sentence and were asked to say what it meant – there were 13 words, such as breech and umbilicus.

The responses were recorded verbatim on a standard form – use of number to recognise patients.

Two doctors scored the form independently – did not know the participant and other doctor’s score.

 Findings:

• On average, terms were understood by less than 40% of the women.
• Women had a far better understanding than the doctors expected.
• Women that already had a child were more likely to comprehend words than those who were attending for their first pregnancy.

Conclusions:

Health workers and doctors use medical language to look more knowledgeable, important and keep the conversations brief. On the other hand, women are afraid to ask questions if they don’t comprehend a word because they don’t want to look stupid and uneducated.

Strength:

• Ecologically valid – the study was conducted in a real setting with real patients and doctors and real terms used in the ward. Therefore, the results are more likely to be realistic.
• Useful – the results could help doctors to increase their communication with patients and encourage them to ask questions if they don’t understand.
• No experimenter bias –  the doctors who marked the definitions of the terms did not know each other’s scores, making the study more reliable as there was no pre-set words  the women needed to include in their definitions.

 Weaknesses:

• Unethical – even though confidentiality was kept, the health service was disrupted and the women might have felt distressed having to admit that they did not know what the words meant.
• Ungeneralizable – the survey only included women of the lower-class and was carried out in a British maternity ward. Therefore, the results cannot be applied to men, women in other countries and people of other social classes.
• Quantitative data – the definitions used words, making the data harder to analyse and increase the chances of it being affected by subjectivity since the doctors would interpret them differently.