Premium
Interpersonal Features of Interviews Between Psychiatric Patients and Nursing Staff 1
Author(s) -
Topf Margaret,
Dambacher Betty,
Roper Janice
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1978.tb00788.x
Subject(s) - psychology , checklist , interpersonal communication , feeling , clinical psychology , interpersonal relationship , categorization , psychiatry , social psychology , philosophy , epistemology , cognitive psychology
Observer ratings of one‐half hour interviews were undertaken to test two basic concepts of interpersonal relations in a sample of 51 randomly paired male psychiatric patients and female psychiatric nurses. It was hypothesized that the behavior of psychiatric patients could be organized around two orthogonal dimensions reflecting status and feeling, and that patients and nurses would exhibit complementary interpersonal behavior consistent with their institutionally ascribed roles. Interviews were rated with the Leary Interpersonal Checklist. Interjudge reliability was established for Leary's coding system. The hypothesis of status and feeling reference points for patient behavior received strong support when the results of analysis of variance were supplemented by factor analysis. Patient scores on the eight variables measured by the Leary Interperonsal Checklist and nurses' scores for 17 complementary variables were submitted to correlational analysis to test the hypothesis of interpersonal complementarity. As predicted, two hypothesized dependence‐assistance response combinations provided the highest correlation coefficients. It was concluded that the study provided empirical support for the utility of an interpersonal model within psychiatric settings that has more commonly been identified with relationships free of psychiatric disturbance.