Video-Based Communication Assessment: Development of an Innovative System for Assessing Clinician-Patient Communication

Good clinician-patient communication is essential to provide quality health care and is key to patient-centered care. However, individuals and organizations seeking to improve in this area face significant challenges. A major barrier is the absence of an efficient system for assessing clinicians\u27 communication skills and providing meaningful, individual-level feedback. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and creation of the Video-Based Communication Assessment (VCA), an innovative, flexible system for assessing and ultimately enhancing clinicians\u27 communication skills. We began by developing the VCA concept. Specifically, we determined that it should be convenient and efficient, accessible via computer, tablet, or smartphone; be case based, using video patient vignettes to which users respond as if speaking to the patient in the vignette; be flexible, allowing content to be tailored to the purpose of the assessment; allow incorporation of the patient\u27s voice by crowdsourcing ratings from analog patients; provide robust feedback including ratings, links to highly rated responses as examples, and learning points; and ultimately, have strong psychometric properties. We collected feedback on the concept and then proceeded to create the system. We identified several important research questions, which will be answered in subsequent studies. The VCA is a flexible, innovative system for assessing clinician-patient communication. It enables efficient sampling of clinicians\u27 communication skills, supports crowdsourced ratings of these spoken samples using analog patients, and offers multifaceted feedback reports

The effects of psychological distance on abstraction: Two meta-analyses.

Psychological distance and abstraction both represent key variables of considerable interest to researchers across cognitive, social, and developmental psychology. Moreover, largely inspired by construal level theory, numerous experiments across multiple fields have now connected these 2 constructs, examining how psychological distance affects the level of abstraction at which people mentally represent the world around them. The time is clearly ripe for a quantitative synthesis to shed light on the relation between these constructs and investigate potential moderators. To this end, we conducted 2 meta-analyses of research examining the effects of psychological distance on abstraction and its downstream consequences. Across 106 papers containing a total of 267 experiments, our results showed a reliable and medium-sized effect of psychological distance on both level of abstraction in mental representation and the downstream consequences of abstraction. Importantly, these effects replicate across time, researchers, and settings. Our analyses also identified several key moderators, including the size of the difference in distance between 2 levels of a temporal distance manipulation and the dependent variable's capacity to tap processing of both abstract and concrete features (rather than only one or the other). We discuss theoretical and methodological implications, and highlight promising avenues for future research

The effects of psychological distance on abstraction: Two meta-analyses.

Psychological distance and abstraction both represent key variables of considerable interest to researchers across cognitive, social, and developmental psychology. Moreover, largely inspired by construal level theory, numerous experiments across multiple fields have now connected these 2 constructs, examining how psychological distance affects the level of abstraction at which people mentally represent the world around them. The time is clearly ripe for a quantitative synthesis to shed light on the relation between these constructs and investigate potential moderators. To this end, we conducted 2 meta-analyses of research examining the effects of psychological distance on abstraction and its downstream consequences. Across 106 papers containing a total of 267 experiments, our results showed a reliable and medium-sized effect of psychological distance on both level of abstraction in mental representation and the downstream consequences of abstraction. Importantly, these effects replicate across time, researchers, and settings. Our analyses also identified several key moderators, including the size of the difference in distance between 2 levels of a temporal distance manipulation and the dependent variable's capacity to tap processing of both abstract and concrete features (rather than only one or the other). We discuss theoretical and methodological implications, and highlight promising avenues for future research