Professional (Entry-Level) Doctoral Degrees in Physical Therapy: Status as of Spring 2003

Journal of Physical Therapy Education, Fall 2006 by Domholdt, Elizabeth, Kerr, Leann O'Reel, Mount, Katherine A

Instrument

The final questionnaire included 4 sections containing 4-15 questions each, for a total of 38 questions. The response categories for the various questions are presented in more detail in the results section of this paper. In the first section of the questionnaire, respondents were asked to select the response that best represented the status of DPT discussions within their institution's program. Respondents then selected up to 3 items from a list of factors in favor of professional DPT education and up to 3 items from a list of factors against professional DPT education. The lists of factors for these 2 questions were formulated from the open-ended responses received in the developmental phases of this research and the results from the spring 2000 survey.

The second section of the questionnaire asked the subset of respondents with programs already implementing the DPT or making the transition to the DPT to comment on changes made to their respective programs for the DPT curriculum, in comparison to the previous master's degree or baccalaureate curriculum offered to their students. Directors of the few new programs transitioning to the DPT level were asked to compare their DPT curriculum to other master's degree or baccalaureate curricula with which they were familiar. This section addressed changes to student qualifications, curriculum, and faculty qualifications.

The third section of the questionnaire focused on institutional characteristics, including institutional control (public versus private), Carnegie classification, and regional location. The final section of the survey addressed program director and faculty characteristics. Finally, identifying information, which was never linked to survey responses, was requested to enable researchers to follow up with nonrespondents. Three follow-up emails were sent before closing the data collection phase of the study.

Data Analysis

Data analysis was conducted using SPSS* version 10.0 5. Means, standard deviations, frequencies, and percentages were used to generate descriptive results. To determine where programs were in the approval process beyond the program level, we calculated the proportion of DPT programs approved at each level out of the total of those for which the level was applicable. In order to compare the 2003 results with the 2000 results, we converted the data in the 2000 study from frequencies to proportions using the same process.

To determine whether there were differences between programs that made different decisions about DPT education, we first divided the programs into 2 groups: those that had made a decision in favor of the DPT (n = 117), and those with other decisions. "Other" decisions included having had no decision (n = 16), having made a decision against (n = 2), or having had a decision pending (n = 9) regarding transition. Due to the small size of each of these subgroups, we combined them for analysis. We then completed statistical tests with alpha set at .0 5 to determine whether the 2 groups differed in their number of graduate-level graduating classes, number of full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty members, proportion of FTE faculty members possessing doctoral degrees (i tests), or institutional control (chi-square test).