Researchers in medical education have been placing increased emphasis on "outcomes research," or the observable impact of educational interventions on patient care. However, although patient outcomes are obviously important, they should not be the sole focus of attention in medical education research. The purpose of this perspective is both to highlight the limitations of outcomes research in m...

This paper compares the approach and resultant outcomes of item response models (IRMs) and classical test theory (CTT). First, it reviews basic ideas of CTT, and compares them to the ideas about using IRMs introduced in an earlier paper. It then applies a comparison scheme based on the AERA/APA/NCME 'Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests' to compare the two approaches under three ge...

This article offers an integration of two different perspectives on health promotion research and practice: one emphasizing the concept of community capacity for health improvement and the other focusing on the notion of health supportive environments. These two approaches generally have emphasized different kinds of community assets for health promotion. Specifically, community capacity resear...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether an educational intervention that focused on physician communication training influenced physician empathic expression during patient interactions. METHODS This study used a quantitative research method to investigate the influence of communication training on physician-expressed empathy using two measures (global and hierarchical) of physician empathic behavior. ...

A questionnaire survey was conducted among all medical students with at least 2 years of medical education studying at 3 medical colleges in Punjab, Pakistan. Of the 1529 respondents (544 males and 985 females), 21.5% were ever smokers (smoked at least once in their lifetime): 9.1% current smokers (including 5.7% daily smokers), 0.7% ex-smokers and 11.7% occasional smokers. The proportions of e...

BACKGROUND Gender bias within medical education is gaining increasing attention. However, valid and reliable measures are needed to adequately address and monitor this issue. This research conducts a psychometric evaluation of a short multidimensional scale that assesses medical students' awareness of gender bias, beliefs that gender bias should be addressed, and experience of gender bias durin...

This question, posed by our grade nine gym teacher who was doubling that day as sex educator, was a pivotal moment in sexual education at our Christian high school. It arose at the end of a lesson that laid out what our teacher assured us were the essential details of sexual activity. Above all, she explained, we were each going to have to be able to draw a line between what counts as sexual (i...

BACKGROUND Empathy is an outcome-relevant physician characteristic and thus a crucial component of high-quality communication in health care. However, the factors that promote and inhibit the development of empathy during medical education have not been extensively researched. Also, currently there is no explicit research on the perspective of practicing physicians on the subject. Therefore the...

Most serious efforts aimed at linking social and behavioral sciences knowledge to medical practice have included "models" which integrate social and behavioral science concepts. We argue that such an integration is intellectually problematic due to an important analytic distinction between "social" sciences and "psychological" sciences. If the social explanation of illness is to become useful i...

This study attempted to improve upon previous qualitative research by conducting a large scale, quantitative study on the parental experience in special education. 76 parents of children receiving special education services were surveyed regarding their communication with school personnel, the focus of their child’s education, involvement in the IEP meeting, and satisfaction. It was found that ...