What is "face" in the voice participant experience and how do we preserve it at inVibe?

Summary

Let’s talk “face”—not the one on Zoom, but the one we manage in every conversation. At inVibe, we’re mindful of face-saving and face-threatening language, especially when asking sensitive questions. When we respect how patients and caregivers see themselves, we get more authentic, insightful responses.

This quick video from Tripp Maloney breaks down how small shifts in language can make a big difference.

Transcript

Hi! I'd like to quickly talk through the concept of face-saving and face-threatening and how knowing about it helps inVibe learn from patients and caregivers.

So you may not have heard the term “face” in the context of communication before, but you most likely already have a really strong sense of the concept. Basically, face is part of how we construct identity in conversations.

Think first about how you would talk to a friend and then how you would talk to a young child. You're bringing a different role, a different identity, to each of those conversations. To your friend, you’re a peer, to the child, you're an adult, and you interact and fulfill that role in your own way. The same concept is really at play whenever we communicate, and it's important to be aware of those roles that we're trying to play.

Roles in conversation can have some wiggle room, but if the way that we talk is not respecting other conversants' face, there's a few possible ways that they can react. They can uneasily try to adopt the new rule that we've given them, work to preserve face, challenge our own face, or simply disengage from the conversation entirely. So, if you were to speak to your friend like a child, that would be something that we call a face threatening act, and a pretty good way to lose that friend.

All of those reactions to face threatening acts can really make inVibe’s job of getting honest, clear responses about sensitive subjects more difficult. So, it's important for us to avoid those face threatening acts when we're designing surveys, particularly because our questions are prerecorded and we can't make active adjustments if a respondent feels slighted early on.

So how do we do this? How do we preserve face? The real key here is to just meet our respondents where they are.

So in the case of patients and caregivers, really trying to understand and appreciate the expertise that they are bringing is a really important way for us to give them power in the interactions that we have with them and helps us to avoid the trap of casting them as passive victims or people who need to be educated more. They're already educating themselves usually very, very highly about the condition that they're in.

This goes doubly true for caregivers as well who often can have a less appreciated role and additional responsibilities of having to manage communication between patients and doctors, in addition to all that learning that they have to do about a condition that's likely was unfamiliar to them before they had to deal with it. So, by recognizing the face that they bring those medical conversations and to constructing our questions in a way that appeals to their expertise, asking them what their experience has been, what they think about X, Y and Z, and just treating them as an equal partner in care decisions is really crucial to creating an environment where they can comfortably share their experiences and their insights with us.

That's all that I have for you today. Thank you so much for listening! I've been Tripp Maloney for inVibe.