Abstract
Objectives: This study aims to investigate the employment preferences of doctoral students majoring in social medicine and health care management (SMHCM), to inform policymakers and future employers on how to address recruitment and retention requirements at CDCs across China. Methods: An online discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted to elicit doctoral SMHCM students’ job preferences. The scenarios were described with seven attributes: monthly income, employment location, housing benefits, children’s education opportunities, working environment, career promotion speed, and bianzhi. A conditional logit model and a mixed logit model were used to evaluate the relative importance of the selected attributes. Results: A total of 167 doctoral SMHCM students from 24 universities completed the online survey. All seven attributes were statistically significant with the expected sign and demonstrated the existence of preference heterogeneity. Monthly income and employment location were of most concern for doctoral SMHCM students when deciding their future jobs. Among the presented attributes, working environment was of least concern. For the sub-group analysis, employment located in a first-tier city was more likely to lead to a higher utility value for doctoral students who were women, married, from an urban area, and had a high annual family income. Unsurprisingly, when compared to single students, married students were willing to forgo more for good educational opportunities for their children. Conclusions: Our study suggests that monthly income and employment location were valued most by doctoral SMHCM students when choosing a job. A more effective human resource policy intervention to attract doctoral SMHCM students to work in CDCs, especially CDCs in third-tier cities should consider both the incentives provided by the job characteristics and the background of students. Doctoral students are at the stages of career preparation, so the results of this study would be informative for policymakers and help them to design the recruitment and retention policies for CDCs.
Highlights
The discrete choice experiment (DCE) results reported were all based on the analysis sample (3672 observations from 153 doctoral social medicine and health care management (SMHCM) students)
The Akaike criterion information (AIC) and BIC values suggested that the mixed logit (MIXL) estimates were preferable to the considered: logit and (Clogit) estimates for the analysis sample and the results from MIXL
Doctoral SMHCM students exhibited strong preferences for provided housing compared with no housing benefits (β = 1.004; p < 0.001), as well as bianzhi compared with no bianzhi (β = 0.964; p < 0.001)
Summary
The Importance of SMHCM and the Geographical Imbalance of Health Workforce. The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic placed a spotlight on infectious disease prevention, identification, and population healthcare management [1]. As an interdisciplinary major between medicine, social science, and management science, social medicine and health care management (SMHCM) shoulders an important part of the responsibility of training the public health workforce, who are at the frontline of this.
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