An investigation of change in medical students’ conceptualizations of psychiatric patients due to a short training course in psychiatry

The paper describes an investigation of medical students' conceptualizations of different psychiatric patients categories, using the Katz-Braly stereotype measuring technique and the semantic differential technique. The conceptual content of sixteen fourth year medical students' stereotypes of psychiatric patient categories was elicited and their evaluations of the categories were measured. These measures were taken before and after a two-month training course in psychiatry and special attention was paid to changes that appeared to result from the educational process. The Katz-Braly stereotype measure produces a work picture of each patients category involving four traits; for instance for the category neurotic the following traits were derived: 'temperamental', 'hypochondriacal', 'worried' and 'tense'. The important triats for each category were analysed separately to determine if any statistically significant changes in the stereotype had occurred over the two-month training course. Several significant additions and omissions of traits were found. These changes may be explained as the result of teaching, the students' direct experience of psychiatric patients and their acquisition of a new technical vocabulary. Despite the changes in the students' stereotypes of patients, their evaluations of the patients, as measured by the semantic differential, remained substantially unaltered by the training course.