A Communication Perspective on What Patient Advisory Boards Do: Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis and Negotiating Advice

Stakeholder advisory boards are recognized as an essential and useful part of patient-centered research. However, such engagement can involve exchanges of diverse individual experiences, multiple opinions, and strong feelings in the face of researchers’ limitations, deadlines, and agendas. Yet, little work examines how these potential tensions occur and are resolved in actual advisory board meetings. This perspective article describes and employs a communication framework for analyzing a patient advisory council (PAC) for a comparative effectiveness study on acupuncture and pain counseling for inpatients with cancer. The framework, Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis (AIDA), is an observational method that examines challenges through recorded and transcribed, naturally occurring interaction. Our analysis focused on two short excerpts from the first PAC meeting to demonstrate members’ navigation of advice-giving and advice-receiving—one in which advice was ultimately implemented by the study team and another in which it was deemed unfeasible. Although advice is inherent to the work of all PACs, it often emerges unannounced as negotiated moments, made up of seemingly minor conversation moves. As a recurring event, advice can and should be analyzed and discussed within PACs to improve communication and team dynamics.