Epistemological beliefs and therapeutic health concepts of physiotherapy students and professionals

BMC Medical Education

Joachim Kimmerle¹  Ulrike Cress¹  Martina Bientzle² 

[1] Department of Psychology, University of Tuebingen, Schleichstr. 4, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany;Knowledge Construction Lab, Knowledge Media Research Center, Schleichstr. 6, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany

关键词: Training status;    Health knowledge;    Therapeutic health concepts;    Epistemological beliefs;   

Others  :  1090896
DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6920-14-208

 received in 2014-06-02, accepted in 2014-09-29,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

Background

Health knowledge develops fast and includes a lot of ambiguous or tentative information. In their daily routine, both health care students and professionals continuously have to make judgments about the viability of health knowledge. People’s epistemological beliefs (EBs) and their therapeutic health concepts are factors that influence how they deal with health knowledge. However, very little is known about the occurrence of these factors at different stages of people’s career. The present study examines the EBs and therapeutic health concepts of physiotherapy students in their vocational training and the EBs and therapeutic health concepts of professionals.

Methods

In a cross-sectional study physiotherapy students and professional physiotherapists filled in a questionnaire that measured their personal EBs about physiotherapy and medicine, as well as their biomedical and biopsychosocial therapeutic health concepts. We compared the participants’ EBs regarding both knowledge domains, and their therapeutic health concepts using paired samples t-tests. We also examined the differences between first-year students, advanced students, and professionals regarding their EBs and their therapeutic health concepts using ANOVAs.

Results

Eighty-three students and 84 professionals participated in this study, 114/167 (68%) participants were female. EBs as well as therapeutic health concepts differed depending upon the participants’ training status. Professionals had more sophisticated EBs than students regarding both knowledge in physiotherapy (F(2, 164) = 6.74, P = 0.002, η²_p = 0.08) and knowledge in medicine (F(2, 164) = 5.93, P = 0.003, η²_p = 0.07). In addition, high values in a biopsychosocial therapeutic health concept already occurred in an early phase of training (F(2, 164) = 5.39, P = 0.005, η²_p = 0.06), whereas increased values in a biomedical concept did not occur until people’s professional life (F(2, 164) = 10.99, P < 0.001, η²_p = 0.12).

Conclusions

The specificities of personal EBs and therapeutic health concepts in different stages of health care training have so far been insufficiently considered in medical education research. The current study has aimed to shed light on the occurrence of these concepts in students as compared to professionals. We point out implications of our findings for educational practice and make suggestions for future research.

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Bientzle et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

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