Is personality a determinant of patient satisfaction with hospital care?

OBJECTIVE: We investigated to what extent personality is associated with patient satisfaction with hospital care. A sizeable association with personality would render patient satisfaction invalid as an indicator of hospital care quality. DESIGN: Overall satisfaction and satisfaction with aspects of care were regressed on the Big Five dimensions of personality, controlled for patient characteristics as possible explanatory variables of observed associations. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 237 recently discharged inpatients aged 18-84 years (M = 50, SD = 17 years), 57% female, who were hospitalized for an average of 8 days. INSTRUMENTS: The Satisfaction with Hospital Care Questionnaire addressing 12 aspects of care ranging from admission procedures to discharge and aftercare and the Five-Factor Personality Inventory assessing a person's standing on Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional stability, and Autonomy. RESULTS: Agreeableness significantly predicted patient satisfaction in about half of the scales. After controlling for shared variance with age and educational level, the unique contribution of Agreeableness shrank to a maximum of 3-5% explained variance. When one outlier was dropped from the analysis, the contribution of Agreeableness was no longer statistically significant. CONCLUSION: Patient satisfaction seems only marginally associated with personality, at least at the level of the broad Big Five dimensions.