However, age offers a certain orientation;
older patients tended to prefer communication about
personal circumstances and to assess open and participatory communication as being less important. Younger patients
assigning more importance to the physician’s participatory
communication style has also been reported in other studies10,30,31,33
and reviews.52 It appears that some older patients
still have a perception of the physician-patient relationship as
being paternalistic and prefer a physician whose clear instructions
convey the impression of competence (see Swenson
et al,53 who studied the reasons for preferring the traditional
communication style in a qualitative study). However, in
our sample, the effect of age was small. Even older patients
showed a clear preference for the participatory communication
style, as demonstrated by the fact that their mean value
on the patient participation scale was the second highest of
all KOPRA scale means (Table 5).