Abstract
Objective: To compare levels of empathy in dentistry students in the cohorts of 2013 and 2016 years, in a public university in Cartagena, Colombia. Material and Methods: The sample consists of 332 students from first to fifth year. The instrument used was the Jefferson Medical Empathy Scale (EEMJ), Spanish version for medical students (version S), validated in Mexico and Chile and adapted for students of dentistry in Colombia. Implementation was anonymous and confidential and informed consent was used. The scale was judged by judges in order to verify cultural validity and students' understanding of the scale was evaluated. The means and standard deviation were estimated. A bifactorial variance analysis, model III was applied to find differences of means between years, the genders and in the interaction of these factors. The comparison between empathic cohort data 2013 and 2016 was performed using the Wilks Lambda Statistician and the M Box test. The level of significance used was α≤0.05 and β<0.20. Results: The results were significant for the academic years factor (p = 0.027), gender (p = 0.782) and interaction (p = 0.364) were not significant. The size of the effect of the statistical differences found is not high. The value of R2 corrected shows that the factors studied explain only 2.9% of all the variation of empathy. Conclusion: The empathy in the study subjects presents some fluctuations; however there are no statistically significant differences for the factors of interest among the cohorts evaluated.
Highlights
Empathy in health care can be understood as a cognitive and behavioral attribute that implies the ability to understand how the patient's experiences and feelings influence and are influenced by the illness and its symptoms and the ability to communicate that understanding to the patient [1,2]
Empathy can be considered a characteristic object of study influenced by many factors [7,8], among which highlight the age, gender, intentionality about the specialty to follow in the future, the academic year of student, family structure and climate, personality, empathic experiences, socio-cultural environment, scale of moral and ethical values, among others; which could act as independent or confounding "variables" and could in turn contribute to explain the observed variability in levels of empathic orientation found in some research [9,10,11]
Material and Methods Study Design. This is a longitudinal study type developed in two cohorts of dentistry students of University of Cartagena in Colombia
Summary
Empathy in health care can be understood as a cognitive and behavioral attribute that implies the ability to understand how the patient's experiences and feelings influence and are influenced by the illness and its symptoms and the ability to communicate that understanding to the patient [1,2]. It constitutes one of the elements necessary to develop a basic communicational ability for human relationship [3]. Empathy can be considered a characteristic object of study influenced by many factors [7,8], among which highlight the age, gender, intentionality about the specialty to follow in the future, the academic year of student, family structure and climate, personality, empathic experiences, socio-cultural environment, scale of moral and ethical values, among others; which could act as independent or confounding "variables" and could in turn contribute to explain the observed variability in levels of empathic orientation found in some research [9,10,11]
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