Osteopathic Medical Student Attitudes Towards Research: Consumers or Creators?

Objectives: The overall research question for this project was to investigate why few osteopathic students pursue research projects and why many hold negative attitudes towards doing research and to understand what research information they want to learn about. The specific objectives include: To describe the attitudes and opinions of osteopathic students regarding research and identify the research-related skills osteopathic students feel they need before graduating from medical school.

Methods: This mixed methods research study included a survey and individual interviews conducted at one osteopathic medical school. The survey was sent to all four classes (both didactic and clinical) with 106 respondents. Survey data was analyzed using descriptive statistics to identify what research skills students value and why they would or would not participate in research as medical students. Fourteen students participated in interviews conducted via Zoom with representation from students from all four years. Transcripts of the interviews were uploaded into a qualitative data analysis software (Dedoose), and the data were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis.

Results: Themes identified from the interviews include the idea that research only means bench/basic science research, students feel pressure to produce research to be competitive without valuing research, they don’t have time to do research, but they want to be able to read and interpret research. The survey data indicates that students understand the importance of research but mostly only do it to be competitive for residency and are more interested in clinical vs. bench research. And as with the interviews, the survey respondents placed more emphasis on skills related to understanding and communicating research than producing research.

Conclusions: Some findings from this study were not surprising, such as the limitations medical students face in terms of lack of time, training, and resources to start a research project and that research is seen mostly as a way to be more competitive for residency. Other findings were more surprising, such as the strong recommendation for more information on how to read and interpret research and the recurrent theme that research mainly means pipettes and drudge work in a lab. The findings influenced our school’s decision to transition a mandatory, 4-week research rotation in the 3rd year from about creating research projects to more about how to consume and communicate research findings.