Development and validation of scale for measuring attitudes towards e-professionalism among medical and dental students: SMePROF-S scale

Abstract

Background Social 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. Methods The 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. Results Total 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. Conclusions The scale measures seven factors of attitude towards e-professionalism and exhibits satisfactory reliability. Based on insights from validation, some possible improvements are suggested.

E-Professionalism among Dental Students from Malaysia and Finland

“…The present cross-sectional study used a self-completed online questionnaire and may suffer from issues related to the validity and reliability of the instrument. Following the completion of the present study, a recent research paper including a validated SMePROF-S scale questionnaire by Marelic et al [ 15 ] was published. Our survey included questions touching similar topics: ethical aspects, dangers of social media, freedom of choice in social media and the importance of social media on professionalism, and physicians of the digital age, as well as negative consequences of social media on profession.…”

“…Research into preferred approaches to digital professionalism training prior to graduation is ongoing [ 14 ]. Recently, a scale developed to measure e-professionalism among medical and dental students in Croatia had seven factors assessing the following aspects; ethical aspects, dangers of social media, excluding physicians (attitude to towards prohibiting or restricting usage of social networks to medical workers), freedom of choice (independence of acting and posting from university rules and social rules), importance of professionalism, physicians in the digital age, and negative consequences [ 15 ]. Unprofessionalism was found to be higher in clinical years among dental students in Thailand [ 6 ], while in the UK, there was contradictory perceptions of what constitutes as professional in the online context [ 7 ].…”

Differences of professionalism perception on social networking sites between doctors of medicine and dental medicine: Development of e-professionalism assessment compatibility index (ePACI)

“…While reviewing literature, although there are available scales and indexes in some form or another for the student population [40,52], we did not encounter a way to easily measure and scale perceptions of eprofessionalism of graduated MDs and DMDs.…”

“…In order to use the instrument with MDs and DMDs instead of students, it has undergone validation and minimal modi cations by excluding two items that were speci c for student population but were not applicable on population of MDs and DMDs [40].…”

Changing Professional Behaviors in the Digital World Using the Medical Education e-Professionalism (MEeP) Framework—A Mixed Methods Multicentre Study

“…Medical educators and policy makers look at e-professionalism as a crossroad between medical professionalism and social networking ( 8 ). Regrettably, there is a plethora of reports about the decay and gross violation of professional behaviors of medical students and physicians in the digital world ( 9 , 10 ). These include, but are not limited to, unauthorized postings of patients' pictures, physician-patient communication podcasts, vlogs with obvious patient identification, HCPs' partying and drinking alcohol in inappropriate attires, and imparting inaccurate medical information mostly driven by commercial agenda of pharmaceutical companies ( 11 ).…”