individualism/collectivism

For my third post this week I would like to relate the idea of individualism and collectivism (found on page 353) to an interesting journal article I read titled “Can dimensions of national culture predict cross-national differences in medical communication?” found in the journal patient education and counseling. In the article, researchers did a study in ten different European countries (all of which of were characterized by a different level of individualism/collectivism) and tried to find how individualism/collectivism influences patients’ experiences with doctor visits. The conclusion was that in countries characterized by a high level of collectivism, patients were more satisfied overall compared to patients in individualist countries. This finding is attributed to the fact that in collectivist countries, doctor’s and patient’s roles are relatively fixed, which led to a positive relationship between what patients expected to happen and what actually happened in their visits. Because collectivist cultures are also more comfortable with vertical relationships, patients tend to question doctors less because of their status, which was also found to positively influence a patience experience.