“Everyone wants his son to be a doctor”: External motives in choosing medicine as a career among an ethnic minority

Dear Sir

Belonging to an ethnic minority group may generate both internal and external motives in choosing medicine as a career. Interviews with Arab physicians employed in public hospitals in Israel indicate that their choice of a medical career is motivated more by extrinsic than by intrinsic motives. Respondents claim that their choice of a medical career is linked to the family matrix, the nature of their community, and the socio-political reality of the Arab minority in the Jewish State of Israel. Many young Arabs in Israel choose medicine as a means of channeling their talent and as a path towards socioeconomic mobility, which enables integration in Israeli society. They also expressed a desire to reduce health gaps between Arabs and Jews in Israel.

The choice of medicine is not depicted by most respondents as a realization of their personal dream – rather as a response to the burning desire of their own families, as well as many other Arab families: “They always tell you when you’re a young boy: ‘You want to be a doctor, right?’ … Everyone wants his son to be a doctor … because people think that if he becomes a doctor, he’ll help them out in life. It’s a good profession” [Ahmad]. “I have an uncle who died. He went to study nursing at a hospital, he was outstanding … One week after obtaining certification, there was a traffic accident and he died … After that, grandma wanted someone else in the family to study medicine. I told her I would do it” [Ibrahim].

These narratives depict primarily collectivist and practical motives, as opposed to the altruistic and individual factors cited in the literature. Apparently, the assumption that intrinsic motives take precedence over extrinsic ones (Deci & Ryan 2002) should be reconsidered when examining medical career motivation among members of ethnic minority groups, especially collectivist ones. Furthermore, we suggest that research should be attentive to the unique motives of people from different ethnic minority groups who choose medical careers, influenced by the specific contexts (e.g., economic, cultural, social and political) affecting their lives. Such attention may increase the number of minority group physicians, who are known to contribute to the narrowing of health gaps in multicultural contexts.