Models of Communication

Core Concepts

The components every model shares

• Sender/receiver: the people (or systems) exchanging messages; in transactional models each person is both at once.
• Message: the content being communicated.
• Encoding/decoding: the sender's translation of ideas into words or signals, and the receiver's translation of those signals back into meaning.
• Channel: the medium — speech, text, video, body language.
• Feedback: the receiver's response that tells the sender whether the message was understood.
• Noise: anything that distorts the message — physical (loud alarms, a poor phone line), physiological (pain, hearing loss, fatigue), psychological (anxiety, bias, stress), or semantic (jargon, language differences).
• Context/environment: the setting and relationship in which communication happens.

The linear model (Shannon–Weaver)

The oldest model describes one-way transmission: source → encoder → channel → decoder → receiver, with noise able to distort the signal at any point. It was developed for telecommunication, not conversation, and it has no feedback loop. In nursing it fits simple one-way events — a call light, an overhead announcement — but it cannot explain a dialogue. Its lasting gift to nursing is the concept of noise.

The interactive model (Schramm)

The interactive model adds feedback and the field of experience — the background of knowledge, culture, and experience each person brings. Communication succeeds when the two fields overlap enough for the message to make sense. This model explains why teaching in a second language or heavy medical jargon fails: the fields barely overlap. The nurse's job becomes enlarging the overlap — plain language, examples, demonstration, and questions.

The transactional model (Barnlund)

The transactional model views communication as simultaneous and continuous: both people are senders and receivers at the same time, and meaning is co-created in a shared context rather than handed from one person to the other. This is the model that best fits the nurse–patient relationship, where a look, a pause, and a word all happen at once, and where the relationship itself shapes the meaning of everything said.

Applying models to nursing situations

A teaching session is transactional: the nurse sends words and tone while reading the patient's expression, and the patient's questions and nods feed back in real time. A shift handoff is a structured communication event with a sender, a receiver, a channel, and noise (interruptions) — which is why frameworks like SBAR exist (see Effective Communication). A patient's anxiety is psychological noise that can block an otherwise clear message; reducing it — privacy, an unhurried pace, clear next steps — is nursing work.

How It Works / Step-by-Step Process

1. Identify the sender, receiver, message, and channel in the situation.
2. Anticipate noise — physical, physiological, psychological, and semantic — before you speak.
3. Send the message and deliberately create a feedback loop (ask, watch, listen).
4. Check whether understanding actually happened, then adjust channel or wording if it did not.

Common Confusions