Developing a Comprehensive Tool to Assess Professional Attitude Among Physicians and Medical Students Publisher



Yavari N¹ ; Asghari F² ; Shahvari Z³ ; Nedjat S^{4, 6} ; Larijani B⁵ Show Affiliations
Source: Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine Published:2021

Abstract

It appears that up until now, no comprehensive tool has been developed to assess medical students’ attitudes toward the different dimensions of professionalism. The present study aimed to develop a comprehensive quantitative tool to evaluate medical students’ attitudes toward professionalism. This study consisted of two phases: The first phase was item generation and questionnaire design based on literature review and a qualitative survey. The qualitative data were extracted from 49 semi-structured individual interviews and one focus group discussion. In the second phase, the questionnaire was developed and its face, content, and structure validity and reliability were evaluated. To measure the construct validity of the questionnaire, a cross-sectional study was conducted on 354 medical students at different academic levels at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. The final questionnaire was loaded on five factors. The factors accounted for 43.5% of the total variance. Moreover, Cronbach's alpha was 0.84 for the total scale, and the interclass correlation coefficient was 0.77 for the test-retest icsandHireliability. The 17-item questionnaire measuring medical students’ professional attitude had acceptable validity and reliability and can be adopted in other studies on physicians’ and medical students’ professional attitudes. © 2021 Tehran University of Medical Sciences.