Bigi Sarah, Ganfi Vittorio, Parlato Sibilla, Piunno Valentina, Rossi Maria Grazia
Department of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Via Necchi 9, Milano 20123, Italy.
Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, Sociali e della Formazione, Università del Molise, Via De Santis, Campobasso 86100, Italy.
Patient Educ Couns. 2025 May;134:108659. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2025.108659. Epub 2025 Jan 26.
On the backdrop of the current debate on shared-decision making in healthcare, we are interested in understanding how uncertainty is managed when patients and/or their caregivers resort to online health communities (OHCs) for advice regarding decisions on aspects of the disease they are not fully sure of. More specifically, we present initial results concerning the expression of uncertainty in OHCs regarding decisions that have to be made about a specific illness. Our goal is to observe how patients and/or their caregivers express uncertainty regarding information they received from specialists. This can help us understand how non-experts try to cope with information they do not fully understand.
Based on a collection of interactional data taken from two Italian OHCs, our analysis focuses on the sequences in which someone asks for advice on a certain line of action and obtains an answer. We follow a mainly qualitative approach, which includes case-based qualitative analyses. More specifically, we observe uses and functions of some lexical items (evidentemente (lit., evidently), teoricamente (lit., theoretically)) and syntactic structures (specifically clauses containing the verb dire (to say)) that convey a sense of uncertainty in relation to information provided by others.
Our results show different types of uncertainty, providing insights into the effort non-experts make in dealing with expert knowledge and unclear situations determined by the illness and its management.
Our results can be used to improve healthcare professionals' training regarding their role as mediators between specialized and everyday knowledge.
在当前关于医疗保健中共同决策的辩论背景下，我们有兴趣了解当患者和/或其护理人员求助于在线健康社区（OHC）以获取有关他们不完全确定的疾病方面决策的建议时，不确定性是如何得到处理的。更具体地说，我们展示了关于OHC中针对特定疾病必须做出的决策所表达的不确定性的初步结果。我们的目标是观察患者和/或其护理人员如何表达对他们从专家那里获得的信息的不确定性。这有助于我们理解非专家如何尝试应对他们不完全理解的信息。
基于从两个意大利OHC收集的交互数据，我们的分析重点关注有人就某一行动方针寻求建议并获得答案的序列。我们主要采用定性方法，包括基于案例的定性分析。更具体地说，我们观察一些词汇项（evidentemente（字面意思为“显然”）、teoricamente（字面意思为“理论上”））和句法结构（特别是包含动词dire（说）的从句）的用法和功能，这些表达了对他人提供的信息的不确定感。
我们的结果显示了不同类型的不确定性，为非专家在处理由疾病及其管理所决定的专家知识和不明情况时所做的努力提供了见解。
我们的结果可用于改进医疗保健专业人员作为专业知识与日常知识之间调解人的角色培训。
