Perceptions, Competencies and Motivation for Study Choice: Occupational Therapy and Social Work Student Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Caring for others is one of the most important attributes for individuals who want to be occupational therapists or social workers. Students are not necessarily aware of the challenges and responsibilities of the helping relationship. Deeper insights are needed into these aspects in order to train and prepare students to become competent, work-ready professionals. This study therefore aimed to describe student beliefs about their chosen profession, the competencies they perceived were most important to develop, and their motivators for their choice of profession. In this explorative study, 51 first-year students from occupational therapy (22 students) and social work (29 students) participated in individual semi-structured interviews. The interviews were transcribed and analysed thematically. Although participants had difficulty defining their future profession, they agreed it was all about helping people. A range of competencies was identified, such as establishing interpersonal relationships, sensitivity to difference, communication, flexibility, and teamwork. Differences emerged according to the chosen profession, such as creativity and imagination for occupational therapy students, and administrative skills and the desire to effect change for social work students. Concerning the choice of profession, most participants wanted to help others and engage in human relationships. Diversity and variety of tasks were also attractive elements of both professions. From the beginning of the program, educational institutions should describe more clearly occupational therapy and social work, so that students can develop a realistic vision of their future profession.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".