Another introduction

[Susan Merel]

Hello--

My name is Susan Merel.  I'm a medical student at the University of Chicago
Pritzker School of Medicine.  I'm working with Dan Brauner, MD in the Department
of Medicine/Section of Geriatrics to develop a scorable instrument, based on
linguistic theory, to use in determining whether patients with dementia (e.g
Alzheimer's disease) are capable of giving informed consent for research
participation.

Our basic framework is Herbert Clark's method of conversational analysis.  One
innovation of our tool in contrast to other methods physicians/researchers use to
determine decision-making capacity is that we evaluate the extent to which the
interviewer facilitates communication with the subject (e.g by using indirect/
embedded repair) as well as the decision-making capacity of the subject.


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Susan Eva Merel
University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine Class of 2004
smerel at midway.uchicago.edu