Dr. Elaine HsiehPosition: Assistant Professor
Education: Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004
| Contact Information | |
email
: |
ehsieh@ou.edu |
phone
: |
(405) 325 - 3154 |
office
: |
Burton 135 |
office hours
: |
T/R 10:30-11:30AM and by appointment |
Classes this semester:
COMM2213 Interpersonal Communication
COMM4413 Issues in Health Communication
Academic interests: My research interests focus on the communicative process between various individuals during an illness event. I am particularly interested in issues related to the cross-cultural contexts of health care and illness, which have long histories of social inequality experienced by minority patients and offer ample opportunities to both advance theory and affect social change. I have been involved in research on bilingual health communication in the past 10 years. The three aspects that I have investigated are (a) the discrepancies between the beliefs and the practice of medical interpreters, (b) interpreters' influences on the quality of health care services, and (c) interpreters' mediation of conversational partners' identities and communicative goals.
In the past few years, I have also extended my theoretical interests to examine coping as a coordinated behavior between various parties. I am particularly interest in how social support and health literacy is coordinated and negotiated between the patient and his/her supportive others. I currently pursue two lines of research dealing with health communication for non-English speaking and/or minority patients. The issues are (a) developing a model of bilingual health communication to explain the effectiveness and appropriateness of interpreters' communicative strategies and (b) investigating how patients' (cultural-specific) social support and health literacy influences their coping strategies and health behaviors. My objective with these two lines of research is to develop theoretical frameworks that not only explain the phenomenon of interest but also guide best practices in health care settings.
Updated 2/2009
Department
of Communication
University of Oklahoma
610 Elm Ave Room 135
Norman, OK 73019
TEL: (405) 325-3154