Dr. Elaine Hsieh
Position: Assistant Professor
Education: Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004
Homepage: http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/H/I-Ling.Hsieh-1/

Contact Information
email :	ehsieh@ou.edu
phone :	(405) 325 - 3154
office :	Burton 135
office hours :	10:15-11:00 Tue, Thu 2:30-3:00 Tue, Thu and by appt

Classes this semester:
COMM 2213: INTERPERSONAL COMM
-W 6:30-9:20 am
-Burton Hall Rm. 208

COMM 5810: COMM INDENTITIES
-M 3:00-5:50 pm
-Burton Hall Rm. 125c



Academic interests: My research interests focus on the communicative process of bilingual health care. I am particularly interested in the issues in 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 medical interpreting throughout my graduate programs. 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. I currently pursue two lines of research dealing with bilingual health communication. 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 minority patients' cultural-specific health beliefs and behaviors influence their interactions with health care providers.

Department of Communication
University of Oklahoma
610 Elm Ave Room 135
Norman, OK 73019
TEL: (405) 325-3154