A study of politeness strategies used by nurses in therapeutic communication in RSUD Pare Kediri

ABSTRACT

In performing daily duties and jobs, a nurse always gets involved in communication activities with patients, patients family, her colleagues, doctors, visitors, and others. The communication between a nurse and patients or the patient’s family happens at the process of treatment. Treatment processes involves five phrases, assessing, diagnosing, planning, implementation, and evaluation. This type of communication is known as therapeutic communication. Therapeutic communication can be in the form of verbal and nonverbal communication. To obtain more comprehensive research result, this research was only focused on verbal communication. The purpose of communication is to help the patient reduce his or her psychological burdens.

In therapeutic communication politeness strategies are very important. The kinds of politeness strategy depend on the characteristic of politeness strategy that is used. This research is conducted in order to find out the politeness strategies, which are used by nurse in RSUD Pare Kediri.

This research used qualitative descriptive design. The data were the utterances, which were collected using participant observation. The subjects of the study were nurses in children room, surgery room, and internist room.

As the result, the researcher finds out that positive and negative politeness strategies were used by nurses in therapeutic communication. The positive politeness which can be found were notice, attend to H, use in group identity markers, avoid disagreement, assert command ground, joke, be optimistic, include both S and H in the activity, Give (or ask for) reasons, and assume or assert reciprocity. Positive politeness which were not found were exaggerate, intensify interest to H, seek agreement, assert/presuppose S’s knowledge of, offer, promise, and give gifts to H. Negative politeness used by the nurses were being conventionally indirect, question (hedge), be pessimistic, minimize the imposition (Rx), give deference, apologize, and impersonalise S and H. Then the negative politeness, which were not found, are state the FT A as a general rule, nominal ize and go on record as incurring a debt.

The researcher hoped that this research could give contribution to other researchers especially in the case of therapeutic communication conducted with reference of age, social status, or education. From the advanced research hoped that the result would show whether there differences communication pattern performed by the nurses in different age, social status, or education of patients.