Intra-and intercultural comparisons of the personality profiles of medical students in Argentina and the United States

Adolescence, Fall, 2002 by Horacio J. A. Rimoldi, Roberto Raimondo, James B. Erdmann, Mohammadreza Hojat

Williams (1979) reported an association between personality measures and vocational choice in medical students, and Murden and colleagues (1978) suggested that taking into consideration the personal characteristics of medical school applicants can increase the prediction of success in the clinical years. Reinhardt and Gray (1972), and Yufit, Pollack, and Wasserman (1969) reported that personality is a salient factor that should receive more attention in the socialization of medical students and physicians. Levinson (1967) suggested that both personality and situational factors should be studied in medical education. Linn and Zeppa (1984) found that externality in locus of control and lower self-esteem affect medical students' perception of stress, and Huebner, Roger, and Moore (1981) spoke of dysfunctional stress and its disturbing effects on medical students' performance. All the aforementioned studies suggest that psychosocial attributes are important in predicting the performance of medical students and ph ysicians.

One issue in psychosocial research in medical education is the difficulty of identifying appropriate attributes. The other issue is that most of the instruments that have been developed to measure discrete aspects of personality and psychosocial characteristics are usually time consuming to administer. The relationship between psychosocial characteristics and professional effectiveness is a complex one, and probably could be best explained not by a single measure, but by a combination of variables.

The issue becomes more complex when cross-cultural factors are examined (Guillemin et al., 1993; Geisinger, 1994) in relation to academic and professional achievement in medical school and beyond. Therefore, it would seem desirable to study a number of variables for in-depth investigation of their potential value in predicting academic and professional success within a culture and between cultures. In order to ultimately determine the value of psychosocial attributes for predicting performance in a cross-cultural study, there is a need to find a set of common variables useful in both cultures. For that purpose, it is important to address two issues.

First, can we identify a set of psychometrically sound instruments to be culturally adapted (Guillemin et al., 1993; Geisinger, 1994; Werner & Campbell, 1970) and to be used in an efficient manner to portray the student's psychosocial profile in different cultures? Second, are there some significant differences among medical students from the same culture (intracultural differences), or among medical students from two different cultures (intercultural differences)?

The first important step in answering these questions is to provide evidence in support of the psychometric properties of the measuring instruments in the cultures in which they are intended to be used as predictors of academic success (culturally adapted measures as described by Brislin, 1970; Geisinger, 1994; Guillemin et al., 1993; Werner & Campbell, 1970). The second step is to examine the intra- and intercultural similarities and differences on personality profiles, and the third step is to examine the validity of personality measures in predicting clinical performance of medical students and physicians in different cultures, in the search for common and specific predictors in different cultures.