Submission ID 120035
| Code | OD-7-4 |
|---|---|
| Type | Oral |
| Abstract Title | The Social Construction of Specialty Choice: Critical Analysis of Medical Students' Online Discourse |
| Will the presenter be a: | Graduate Student |
| Methods | A corpus of discussion threads from the r/medschoolcanada subreddit (August 2024-August 2025) was collected using a Python scraper to extract posts tagged with keywords relevant to medical specialties. Threads were then manually screened for relevance. A framework combining Discursive Psychology and Critical Discourse Analysis guided qualitative analysis of how individual and structural discourses shape specialty perceptions. |
| Results | Analysis of 338 posts and 3900 comments revealed that family medicine and career decisions were frequently framed through competing repertoires of individual agency and structural constraints. Concurrently, there is systematic devaluation of generalist practice through ideological frameworks privileging subspecialty expertise and income. Overall, students' identity work simultaneously reproduced and contested power structures that systematically undervalue family medicine while establishing a hierarchy of medical specialty desirability. |
| Discussion | These findings highlight how individual and social engagement with dominant ideologies dissuade students from pursuing family medicine. Understanding this discursive construction provides educators and policymakers insight into how students make career decisions, guiding potential interventions to improve recruitment into family medicine. |
| Abstract Track - First Choice | The Culture of Academic Medicine |
| Authors | Nicole Fu X Catherine Tong Stacey Ritz Keyna Bracken Lawrence Grierson |
