ROLE RELATIONSHIP IN VETERINARIAN-CLIENT-PATIENT COMMUNICATION DURING HISTORY-TAKING STAGE

Abstract

This article identified the type of relationship between veterinarians and pet owners and their social roles during the history-taking stage of the clinical consultations.Veterinarian-client-patient consultations were audio recorded from a public veterinary hospital in Malaysia. Discourse analysis approach was used to analyse the data following Goffman’s (1974, 1981) notion of the participation framework and the framework proposed by Shanan (2011)to identify the social roles of the participants during the interaction. The findings in this study revealed that veterinarians and their clients oriented themselves to certain frames in the form of tasks and roles to achieve the medical goals during the medical consultation. The results are hoped to inform veterinary communication training for more effective veterinarian-client communication.

Keywords: discourse analysis, veterinarian-client-patient communication, history-taking stage, frames, footings