Responsiveness to maternal concern in preventive child health visits: an analysis of clinician-parent interactions.

Clinician-parent interactions in preventive child health visits should reflect parental concern. Variations in this visit process according to the level of maternal concern were explored. Forty initial visits to a pediatric clinic were videotaped. Mothers were interviewed before the visits to determine their concerns about their infants. Videotapes were analyzed using Resource Exchange Analysis, a clinically based method of interaction analysis. Highly concerned mothers had longer visits, initiated more interaction, sought more information, talked more about their infants, expressed more worry, and received more clinician empathy (all p less than 0.05). Analysis also showed significant differences in visit process according to clinician type and sex. Stepwise multiple regressions, controlling for clinician type and sex, revealed persistent contribution by maternal concerns to variance in visit process variables (all p less than 0.004), change in R2 0.16 to 0.32). It was concluded that clinician-parent interactions in the preventive child health visits are responsive to parental concerns.