Pediatric residents' use of jargon during counseling about newborn genetic screening results

Michael Farrell, Lindsay Deuster, Jodi Donovan, Stephanie Christopher

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

53 Scopus citations

Abstract

OBJECTIVE. The goal was to investigate pediatric residents' usage of jargon during discussions about positive newborn screening test results. METHODS. An explicit-criteria abstraction procedure was used to identify jargon usage and explanations in transcripts of encounters between residents and standardized parents of a fictitious infant found to carry cystic fibrosis or sickle cell hemoglobi-nopathy. Residents were recruited from a series of educational workshops on how to inform parents about positive newborn screening test results. The time lag from jargon words to explanations was measured by using "statements," each of which contained 1 subject and 1 predicate. RESULTS.Duplicate abstraction revealed reliability k of 0.92. The average number of unique jargon words per transcript was 20;the total jargon count was 72.3 words. There was an average of 7.5 jargon explanations per transcript, but the explained/total jargon ratio was only 0.17. When jargon was explained, the average time lag from the first usage to the explanation was 8.2 statements. CONCLUSION. The large number of jargon words and the small number of explanations suggest that physicians' counseling about newborn screening may be too complex for some parents. Copyring

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)243-249
Number of pages7
JournalPediatrics
Volume122
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2008
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Communication
  • Cystic fibrosis
  • Genetic testing
  • Newborn screening
  • Sickle cell disease

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