Dear Sir
The Dundee Polyprofessionalism inventory (Roff et al. Citation2011) of lapses in undergraduate Academic Integrity requires respondents to recommend sanctions for more than 30 mini-Situational Judgement Scenarios on a range from 0 (Ignore) to 10 (expel/report to regulator). Now that data have been collected from administrations in 4 countries (Scotland n = 375; Saudi Arabia n = 125; Egypt n = 219; Pakistan n = 480) I observe that while the response profile overall can be significantly different between countries, suggesting different professionalism cultures, there is in each sample only one difference of more than 2 levels on the 10-point scale between genders. In the Scottish sample there were no statistically significant differences between each 20% of the respondents from early to late responders, though this has not yet been explored in the other datasets.
This observation is in contrast to the frequent gender differences reported in scores of studies around the world using the Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure where respondents rate their personal perceptions of various elements of educational culture on a Likert scale of 0–5.
Are we seeing here the process of student socialisation into the comparative frames of reference of medical professionalism? Is the almost ‘fractal-like’ (http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/) profile of each cohort at least at the binary level of gender responses a function of both the cohort’s homogeneity in terms both of its highly selective admission to medical school and progressive socialisation into strongly mandated professionalism norms?
It should be emphasised that this ‘fractal-like’ characteristic holds only at the binary level of, for example, gender differences in responses. There is more differentiation if we analyse by age or year-of-study.
Using the now relatively inexpensive online tools of ‘Big Data’ (Ellaway et al. Citation2014) we could extend this ‘mapping’ of individual and cohort professional identity formation in a variety of ways to track the learning curves. More research is clearly needed but, if confirmed, this fractal-like quality might also indicate that Professionalism studies may not need to rely on high response rates to be robust, but could be conducted with well-constructed stratified, representative samples of 20–30% of the target population.
Declaration of interest: The author report no conflicts of interest.
References
- Ellaway R, Pusic M, Galbraith RM, Cameron T. (2014). Developing the role of big data and analytics in health professional education. Med Teach 36:216–222
- Roff S, Chandratilake M, Mcaleer S, Gibson J. (2011). Preliminary benchmarking of appropriate sanctions for lapses in undergraduate professionalism in the health professions. Med Teach 33(3):234–238