Person Reference and Related Attributes in Positive and Negative Yelp Hospital Reviews

In the last decade, a number of studies from medical sciences have analyzed data from the reviewing platform Yelp to explore patient satisfaction. Many of these have adopted a thematic analytic approach and have consistently found that patients tend to discuss nonclinical issues far more frequently than they do clinical issues. Specifically, patient narratives frequently mention interpersonal interactions and communications with physicians and staff. Our study builds on this scholarship by providing a more fine-grained discourse analysis of Yelp reviews in order to better understand the ways in which patients refer to their encounters and interactions with doctors, nurses, and staff members in a set of hospital reviews. Our analysis of 100 positive and negative reviews of 10 hospitals found that reviews were often written by family members on behalf of patients rather than by the patients themselves. In addition, reviewers were far more likely to name specific individuals in positive reviews; conversely, negative reviews featured more impersonal constructions. The study also found that different types of linguistic resources (i.e., adjectives versus verbs) were used by reviewers for positively evaluating physicians and nurses, respectively, and that negative reviews of physicians, nurses, and staff discussed a range of different communicative behaviors. Finally, our findings suggest that some complaints about hospital employees may, in fact, point to larger, organization-level problems.