Impact of Health Status Label on Medical Students' Expectations for Children's Coping Style and Choice of Approach Strategy

Whether medical students' judgments about how a child might cope with an injection as well as whether students' recommended choice of approach in administering an injection are influenced by expectations concerning a child's health status were experimentally tested. 102 first-year and fourth-year medical students were randomly assigned to view a healthy child labelled healthy (HL) or in remission from leukemia (RLL). Assigned health status labels affected expectations, such that RLL children were more likely to be expected to use distraction than HL children in coping with a medical stressor. Fourth-year medical students were more likely than first-year medical students to recommend time-expedient approach strategies in administering an injection to a child. Female medical students were more likely to recommend the use of less-time expedient approach strategies than male medical students. Students reported an overall bias to use an active, monitoring strategy when approaching a child, regardless of their expectations concerning the child's coping preference.