Interpersonal trust in doctor-patient relation:evidence from dyadic analyses and association with quality of dyadic communication

Body: Trust in doctors depends on doctor’s quality of communication and is positively associated with adherence to treatment, continuity of care, willingness to recommend the physician to others, and self-reported health. Although trust is an interpersonal phenomenon and is essential to relationship-centered care, doctors and patients have been studied separately. Members of dyadic relationships influence each other’s behaviors and are interdependent because they share a past history and eventually a common future. There is a family of analysis, called One-With-Many (the ‘one’ is the doctor, the ‘many’ are the patients), that allows to examine the composition of trust variance through a partitioning that keep into account the interdependence of the data collected on both patients and doctors. The aim of this paper was to examine the composition of trust in doctor-patients relationships and its association with doctors’ quality of communication. Twelve GPs (Mage = 54.16, SD = 12.28, 8 men) and 189 of their patients (Mage = 47.48, SD = 9.88, 62% women; doctor-patients range 1-30, M = 14, SD = 9.3) took part in the research. Results revealed that if a doctor reported high trust with a particular patient, then the patient reported similar high level of trust (dyadic reciprocity). Higher quality of communication was positively associated to dyadic effect of trust. Our study emphasizes the importance to study trust in doctor-patients relationship as a dyadic and interdependent phenomenon applying appropriate methodological design and analysis. An emphasis to reach a convergence between doctor’s and patients’ perceptions of their relationship may enhance trust more than conventional intervention and ultimately may contribute to better health outcomes