A profile of nonurban physicians from the study of changing and learning in the lives of physicians *

Abstract

A secondary analysis was conducted on the research by Fox and others concerning changing and learning in the lives of physicians.(1) A subset of 81 cases of change reported by 33 non-urban physicians was analyzed to investigate how these physicians select and use human helpers, material resources, and continuing medical education (CME) during change. Both descriptive statistical methods and the constant comparative method described by Glazer and Strauss were utilized.15 Results indicate that the changing/learning process and learning strategies within that process for nonurban physicians is very similar to the general population as reported by Fox et al.1 Nonurban physicians most typically selected human helpers on the basis of established trust, selected material resources by how current and how authoritative the source was, and used CME more often in the stage of making the change versus preparing for or solidifying the change. The physicians consistently used multiple types of learning resources in their changing/learning process, often using different types of resources for each stage of change.