Event: CoAS Research Day
Presentation: Medical Students' Strategies for Standardized Tests of Communication
Date: 2020Type: Judged Presentation
Abstract Title: Medical Students' Strategies for Standardized Tests of Communication
The use of standardized patients (SPs) is now common and widespread in medical schools in the United States. While these encounters are artificial, they provide important opportunities for medical students to practice social skills related to patient-physician interactions. And yet, because these encounters are evaluated using standardized metrics, medical students are aware of the need to perform to the test in such an artificial setting. This becomes interesting for sociologists, as these encounters deal with questions of empathetic communication and emotional engagement, which are intersubjective. How do medical students understand these requirements? In this paper, we analyze one years’ worth of posts from Reddit and StudentDoctorNetwork to understand the ways in which medical students account for their performances of emotional labor in standardized testing contexts. We find that students are aware of the gap between expectations within testing standards and those of the clinic, and that students have routinized strategies for passing the test.