Performance and health in surgical residency : exploring the roles of gender, stereotype threat, and values affirmation
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Women who pursue surgical training do so despite the stereotype that men are better surgeons than women. Thus, in addition to the typical difficulties encountered during residency, women in surgical training have the burden of proving that they are as capable as men. In this context, women may experience stereotype threat, a phenomenon thta occurs when people fear being seen in light of a negative stereotype about a group to which they belong. Stereotype threat has been shown to undermine minority learners' performance in other settings. This study assessed whether stereotype threat affected women in surgical training with regard to their performance and psychological health. I additionally tested a social-psychological intervention known as values affirmation, which has been shown to reduce the effects stereotype threat in other populations, on surgical residents. I measured residents' performance (using professional and laboratory performance measures) and psychological health. Greater levels of stereotype threat were associated with poorer psychological health for women, but they were not associated with poorer performance. While omnibus tests of values affirmation were not significant, exploratory internal analyses tentatively suggested that values affirmation benefited examination and clinical performance for women and working memory for both men and women. This is the first study of stereotype threat in a medical context and is the first attempt to understand the effects of both stereotype threat and affirmation on psychological health and performance in this setting. I discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to the retention of women in surgical training and the performance of surgical residents, i.e., delivery of patient care.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Salles, Arghavan |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Cohen, Geoffrey |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Geoffrey |
| Thesis advisor | Mueller, Claudia Meta |
| Advisor | Mueller, Claudia Meta |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Arghavan Salles. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Arghavan Salles
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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