Do entry year pharmacy students have similar personal characteristics? Comparing personalities, professional goals, and role perceptions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Schools and faculties of pharmacy are responsible for selecting students to admit into the profession. Despite many similarities, admission processes, pharmacists' training, and scope of practice are different across jurisdictions. Students that are selected for admission may then differ in a number of ways, including by personality traits and other individual difference measures. OBJECTIVE: To compare the trait characteristics between students entering a New Zealand (NZ-University of Otago) and Canadian ((University of Waterloo) pharmacy programme and to compare their professional goals and role perceptions. METHODS: Incoming first year students at each university were invited to take an online questionnaire that included personality characteristics and potential predictors of involvement in pharmacists' roles: (1) the Big Five Inventory (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism); (2) the Achievement Goals Questionnaire-Revised; (3) the Rational Experiential Inventory; and (4) Counsellor Role Orientation. Statistical tests were conducted to determine if there were differences between entry level pharmacy students from NZ and Canada. RESULTS: 184 students (97/150 Otago, 87/118 Waterloo) completed the survey. On average, Waterloo students scored higher on agreeableness (M = 80 vs. 76, p = 0.06), conscientiousness (M = 70 vs. 68, p = 0.30), mastery-approach (M = 93 vs.90, p = 0.06), and faith-in-intuition (M = 67 vs. 61, p = 0.03) compared to Otago pharmacy students who were higher for openness M = 70 vs. 66, p = 0.09). An item measuring reliance on physicians for medicine advice was endorsed more by Otago pharmacy students (M = 35 vs. M = 15, p < 0.001). Items on time pressure (e.g., "It takes too much time to for a pharmacist to talk with a patient about the medication they receive") were higher for Otago students (M = 41 vs. M = 38, p = 0.26). Higher scores for pharmacist restriction ("There should be legal restrictions on what pharmacists can tell patients") were also seen among Otago students (M = 26 vs. M = 12, p < 0.001). There were important differences between entry level pharmacy students and practicing pharmacists in both jurisdictions. DISCUSSION: While entry-level pharmacy students had similar personality profiles, differences were observed in role expectations and in experiential learning orientation. This highlights differing societal views on the role of pharmacists in each respective country. Pharmacy schools should study their student bodies when designing their curricula and electives, helping ensure graduates feel like they have the training to do what they need to do. Future work will determine if these personality and learning goals influence students' preparation for practice.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".