Identity conflicts of student affairs officers in a medical university

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Collaboration between student affairs officers and the faculty is important in dealing with the recent rapid changes in medical education, and mutual understanding is essential to ensure that participants become a cohesive social group. This study explores the identity conflicts of student affairs officers in medical universities using the figured worlds theory.

Methods

An exploratory qualitative case study was conducted with 24 student affairs officers at a private medical university in Japan. Data were collected through face-to-face, semi-structured interviews and analysed using thematic analysis from the perspective of a social constructivism paradigm.

Results

Qualitative analysis revealed the following three themes regarding the identity conflicts of student affairs officers: differences in the perception of medical students, difficulties in building trusting relationships with the faculty, and resistance to the medical university’s traditional atmosphere. Student affairs officers tended to provide support from a student-centred perspective when interacting with medical students, while the faculty employed a teacher-centred perspective.

Discussion

To promote understanding between professions, it is necessary to set aside certain professional views and welcome dialogue with other professionals with different values, while also understanding the multi-layered context of medical education, so that conflicts can be handled optimally and relationships can be professionalised for social cohesion.

KEYWORDS:

• Student affairs officers
• identity
• collaboration
• figured worlds theory
• qualitative study

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the participants who gave their time and participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Ethical approval for this study was provided by the Institutional Review Board of Kansai Medical University (2021127). All participants provided written informed consent for the study.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available in order to protect the originality of our work so that we can continue evaluating future participants, but are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grants from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.