Development and evaluation of an instrument to assess medical students' cultural attitudes.

TL;DRAbstract

This paper describes the development and psychometric evaluation of an instrument designed to assess medical students' comfort with a range of sociocultural issues and intercultural experiences. Each survey item obliged students to reflect on their own sociocultural identities and academic status in relation to others', and to judge how comfortable they would be interacting across perceived boundaries based on sociocultural identity and academic status. More than 90% of University of Michigan first-year medical students (n=153) completed the survey just before classes began. Principal components analysis of the survey's 26 items identified 7 interpretable factors or subscales; the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients for the 7 subscales and the total scale ranged from .73 to .92. T-tests were used to investigate differences in average ratings among student subgroups (based on gender and ethnicity). To assess the magnitude of the effect of the differences between groups, effect size

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper