Researching the effects of confidentiality law on patients' self-disclosures.

We hypothesized that conflicting research findings on the effects that confidentiality laws have on patients' self-disclosures reflect the fact that privacy is important only to some patients in some circumstances. Instead of asking whether privacy is always important, we posed the following question: What factors determine whether privacy is important? With 42 outpatients we found that self-disclosures about sensitive issues (e.g., child abuse, drug abuse) during intake were determined partly by how legally informed patients were and partly by how relevant and consequential the law was to their cases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)