Social representations of first-year medical students about the medical profession

Abstract

Each student enters university life with his or her own experiences, knowledge, and attitudes. They all have an idea of ​​what it means to be a doctor, which could be strengthened or changed over time. However, there is little research that seeks to understand the appreciation and opinion that students have about the professionalism of doctors. The objective of this work is to characterize and analyze the social representations of first-year medical students about the medical profession.

A group of 47 first-year medical students were asked to answer voluntarily, openly, and in writing the question “What does it mean to you to be a doctor?” A qualitative-quantitative design was used. A descriptive analysis of the texts was carried out, looking for the most frequent words and bigrams, using the dplyr, readtext, stopwords, stringr, and tidyr libraries of R. In addition, the answers were analyzed according to the coding paradigm proposed by Grounded Theory, which allowed the abstraction and reintegration of the data.

Among the most frequent nouns in the answers, those related to the daily life of the profession (people, patient, life, health, well-being, community) stand out; the verbs most cited by the students have a positive feeling towards people: help, be able to, improve, listen, cure, accompany. Among the bigrams, some interesting ones can be highlighted, such as “great responsibility” and “different realities”. Following the Grounded Theory, the following categories were generated: “Knowledge”, “Skills and abilities”, “Ethical-moral attitudes and values” and “Functions and activities”. In the answers, the feeling of helping people with a holistic view that goes beyond the purely care-related aspect predominated, having to integrate this aspect with values ​​such as empathy and solidarity. They attributed to the doctor a fundamentally social role, characterized by his disposition towards continuous learning and constant research. Likewise, they considered that the doctor must be a person willing to listen to and advise his patients, exercising attributes such as respect, tolerance and understanding.

Exploring discourses on medical professionalism among medical students will allow for the design of pedagogical strategies, debate prior knowledge, and promote necessary ethical and social attitudes and skills.