Fundamentals

What is descriptivism?

Making decisions about prescription drugs: A study of doctor–patient communication. Health, Risk and Society 2011 (Gregory, Peters, & Slovic, 2011)

An excellent paper I only discovered on 14 July 2014. I wondered why and found in Google Scholar that it had only 5 citations, which include 2 Masters theses and one in an Iranian journal. Highly significant that it has not been cited in the mainstream, or even tributary, SDM or patient-centred or communication literatures, despite all their ‘systematic’ reviews. Why? Could it be the use of a prescriptive multi-criteria decision analytic framework (PrOACT) to organise their description of current practice, as well as to provide the basis of their prescription for improvement? Even though they only want to use mcda as the informal and largely non-numerical structure for improved MCDDeliberation, not for an MCDAnalysis-based aid, I hypothesise that even this may be too much for the fundamentalist descriptivists who dominate those literatures - and whose ideological bias constitutes a serious conflict of interest, with major implications in peer review for publication and conference presentations, as well as for grants and career progression