Abstract
BackgroundSocial media permeated everyday life and consequently it brought some changes to behaviour of health professionals. New form of professionalism emerged called e-professionalism depicting professional behaviour while using social media. There are a number of studies conducted in the past several years measuring behaviour of different populations of health professionals on social media and social media sites. Many studies have investigated aspects of e-professionalism of medical or dental students as future health professionals, but there are no validated instruments made for assessing attitude towards e-professionalism of those two populations. Objective of this paper is to validate a newly developed scale for measuring attitudes towards e-professionalism among medical and dental students.MethodsThe original 32-item scale was developed and administered to 411 medical students (RR 69%), and 287 dental students (RR 49.7%). Exploratory factor analysis was used to investigate the existence of underlying factors. Principal component analysis was used as an extraction method with oblimin as selected oblique rotation method. Cronbach’s alpha was used to assess reliability.ResultsTotal of 698 student answers entered analysis. The final scale had 24 items that formed seven factors named: ethical aspects, dangers of social media, excluding physicians, freedom of choice, importance of professionalism, physicians in the digital age, negative consequences. Cronbach’s alpha indicating scale reliability was .72. Reliability conducted on each factor ranged from .570 to .877.ConclusionsThe scale measures seven factors of attitude towards e-professionalism and exhibits satisfactory reliability. Based on insights from validation, some possible improvements are suggested.
Highlights
Social media permeated everyday life and it brought some changes to behaviour of health professionals
The effort to understand and improve eprofessionalism of health professionals on social media sites is visible in the commitment that large number of medical and educational institutions make through various guidelines and advices for online behaviour
The aim of this study is to develop and validate a scale for the assessment of attitude towards e-professionalism in medical students and dental students that could be used to measure attitude and to compare those attitudes of these two populations
Summary
Social media permeated everyday life and it brought some changes to behaviour of health professionals. Many studies have investigated aspects of e-professionalism of medical or dental students as future health professionals, but there are no validated instruments made for assessing attitude towards e-professionalism of those two populations. The emergence of social networks sites as a new form of digital media and communication channel has brought many challenges for the health system [1,2,3]. E-professionalism is a derived form of professionalism and can be defined as implementation of traditional principles of professionalism during online activities. The effort to understand and improve eprofessionalism of health professionals on social media sites is visible in the commitment that large number of medical and educational institutions make through various guidelines and advices for online behaviour. Some form of guidelines for e-professionalism are published or available online by a large number of institutions: The American Medical Association [6], The Australian and New Zealand Medical Association [7], The British Medical Association [8] and many others
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