McKinstry and Wang (1991)

Aims:

To determine how acceptable patients found different styles of doctor’s dress code and whether patients felt that that the dress code influenced their respect.

Procedures:

• Showed 8 photos – 5 of a man and 3 of a woman.
• 475 patients from 5 different GPs.

Independent variable: whether they were dressed formally (white coat over skirt or suit) or informally (jeans, short-sleeved shirt, pink trousers, gold earrings)

Dependent variable: how happy the would be to see the doctor in the picture and how much confidence they would have in the doctor’s ability.

Findings

• Participants preferred male doctors in a smart suit and female doctors in a skirt a jumper.
• Less acceptability for:

         – Male doctors wearing jeans (59%), wearing earrings (55%) and having long hair                 (46%).

      – Female doctors wearing jeans (63%) and jewellery (60%)

• Expectations are that doctors should wear:

         · White coat – 15%

         · Suit – 44%

         · Tie – 67%

• Most people who preferred formally dressed doctors were older in age or from professional class.

Conclusions

The traditionally dressed images received higher preference rating than the casually attired one, particularly in the older and professional-class patients.

Strengths:

Usefulness – it showed the importance of appearance and first impressions in developing patients confidence in doctors.
Quantitative data/reliability – the study collected quantitative data, meaning that it could not be affected by subjectivity. This makes the study more reliable.
The same pictures were used for all the participants, therefore there was consistency.
 

Weaknesses:

Reductionist – as shown by Argyle there are other factors which could affect first impressions and confidence is doctor’s ability e.g. facial expressions.
Low ecological validity – pictures are not real-life situations and the people in them weren’t real.
Sample – the study was only carried out in Western Europe, therefore the results cannot be generalised to other countries and parts of the world because it is unknown whether these findings are just due to the culture.