Introduction. Sequence analysis of patient-provider interaction.

In doctor-patient communication research a few mainstreams can be distinguished: a robust quantitative line of research, in which all patient and/or physician utterances are classified in a basically neutral coding system, usually consisting of a comprehensive set of mutually exclusive categories like RIAS (Roter, 1995) and VR-MICS (Del Piccolo et al., 1999; 2002), versus some more qualitative approaches in which either physician's general performance is valued within a normative frame of reference, like MAAS-R (van Thiel et al., 1991) or selected micro-processes within the medical consultation are studied in great detail, making use of the methodology of