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Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

I am a doctor in your shoes

The empathic strategies employed by Chinese doctors during text-based online medical consultations

| Nanjing University
ORCID logo | Harbin Engineering University
| Harbin Engineering University
The ability to be empathic with the emotionally-charged personal accounts of patients in a medical consultation is an essential attribute of a qualified doctor. However, there is a lack of empirical research on how empathy is interactionally achieved by Chinese doctors in text-based online medical consultations (OMC). Based on 600 records of text-type online consultations retrieved from https://​www​.120ask​.com, this paper aims to explore how empathy is pragmatically constructed for doctor-patient rapport management in online medical consultations. The findings of this analysis reveal that the types of empathy are in the form of cognitive empathy, affective empathy, sharing empathy, and nurturing empathy. By showing how doctors discursively used these four types of empathic strategies, the study contributes to the limited but growing body of research on Chinese doctors’ empathic strategies in online medical consultations.
Keywords: empathy, Chinese doctor-patient communication, online medical consultation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Defining empathy
    • 2.2Empathy in medical consultations
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Data coding and data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Cognitive empathy
    • 4.2Affective empathy
    • 4.3Sharing empathy
    • 4.4Nurturant empathy
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 July 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.22101.zha
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