Factors Affecting Physicians' Credibility on Twitter When Sharing Health Information: Online Experimental Study.

Background: Largely absent from research on how users appraise the credibility of professionals as sources for the information they find on social media is work investigating factors shaping credibility within a specific profession, such as physicians.

Objective: We address debates about how physicians can show their credibility on social media depending on whether they employ a formal or casual appearance in their profile picture. Using prominence-interpretation theory, we posit that formal appearance will affect perceived credibility based on users' social context-specifically, whether they have a regular health care provider.

Delivering bad news in emergency care medicine.

Forecasting is a strategy for delivering bad news and is compared to two other strategies, stalling and being blunt. Forecasting provides some warning that bad news is forthcoming without keeping the recipient in a state of indefinite suspense (stalling) or conveying the news abruptly (being blunt). Forecasting appears to be more effective than stalling or being blunt in helping a recipient to "realize" the bad news because it involves the deliverer and recipient in a particular social relation.

Asking to Speak to Another: A Skill for Soliciting Survey Participation.

This paper is in the vein of applied conversation analysis, dealing with a problem of declining participation rates for survey interviews. When calling a household to request participation in a survey, interviewers may ask for a pre-selected "sample person." We first explore how interviewers design this request in a more or less presumptive way, depending on how and when they identify themselves.