Calling Situated: A Survey Among Medical Students Supplemented by a Qualitative Study
Abstract Background calling within the medical context receives growing academic attention and empirical research has started to demonstrate its beneficial effects. The purpose of this study is to investigate what motivates students to enter medical school and what role calling may play (i), to evaluate if calling influences their perception of the learning context (ii) and to compare medical students’ experience of calling with those of physicians. Methods A questionnaire survey was distributed among medical students (N = 1048; response rate above 60%) of Lausanne University, Switzerland, supplemented by a group discussion between bachelor medical students (N = 8) and senior physicians (N = 4), focusing on different facets of calling. An existing data set of a survey among physicians, addressing calling with the same items, was used to compare students’ and physicians’ attitudes towards calling. Survey data were analyzed with the habitual statistical procedures for categorical and continuous variables. The group discussion was analyzed by means of thematic analysis. Results the survey showed that experiencing calling is a motivational factor for study choice and influences positively choice consistency. Students experiencing calling differed from those who did not : they attributed different definitions to calling, indicated more often prosocial motivational factors for entering medical school and perceived the learning context as less burdensome. The analysis of the group discussion revealed that calling is polysemous, fluid, conceived as having the characteristics of a double-edged sword and originating from within or outside or from a dialectic interplay between the inner and outer world. Finally, calling is experienced less often by physicians than by medical students, who experience calling in a decreasing prevalence with increasing immersion in the clinical years of the study of medicine. Conclusions calling plays an important role in study choice and consistency of medical students. Given its relevance for medical students and its ramifications with the learning context, calling should become a topic of the reflexive parts of the medical curriculum. We critically discuss the role played by calling for medical students and provide some perspectives on how calling could be integrated in the reflection and teaching on physician-hood.