IISES International Academic Conference, Copenhagen

USING ILLNESS NARRATIVES TO DEVELOP HEALTHCARE STUDENTS AND PROVIDERS’ PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

YA-HUEI WANG, HUNG-CHANG LIAO

Abstract:

Literary narratives regarding personal illness can help healthcare students and providers reflect upon troubling medical care situations or dilemmas in literature reading through which they can make a connection between patients’ illness and their own life experiences to derive their life meaning and professional identity. Namely, through narrating, they can have a strong tie and identification to medical or health care profession. Viewing that there is no, or almost no, research using illness narratives to investigate professional identity, this proposal intends to develop a valid and reliable Professional Identity Scale for Healthcare Students and Providers (PIS-HSP). After literature review and expert panel discussion to elicit the initial PIS-HSP scale, five hundred sixty-two randomly selected medical care students and professionals participated in the pilot study. Questionnaires returned with missing data were regarded as invalid. Statistics was calculated using SPSS (version 14.0). The validities and reliabilities of the assessment will include construct validity, internal consistency of the scale, expert validity.

Keywords: Illness narratives, healthcare, professional identity, validity, reliability