The Analysis of the Polarized Attitudes toward Medical Humanities among Medical Students – an Ethnographic Exploration

Under the impact of medical education reform on the global scale, the medical humanities education in Taiwan has developed since 25 years ago. However, many uncertainties still exit about the status of medical humanities in medical education here, and the growth of medical humanities education has hit its bottlenecks. According to the author's view, there exists a polarization of attitudes among medical students toward medical humanities, and this condition needs to be understood from an experiential and contextual approach, for the betterment of developing medical humanities education here. Different from the explanatory models based on socialization and professionalization, the concept of habitus from Bourdieu's practice theory provides an analytical model with more field sensitivity and balance between structure and agency to analyze medical education. With this model, the transformative and formation process of medical profession can be better explained, and the confusion and contradiction of attitudes toward medical humanities held by medical students can be more adequately interpreted. This study adopts a qualitative approach, combining ethnographic study with focus group method adjusted for the practical features and concerns of the research field; and through which the attitudinal contrast toward medical humanities among medical students and its implicit meanings related to habitus is explored. By this qualitative and empirical approach, this study expects to analyze in a bottom-up and inside-out way the nature and meaning of the problems medical humanities education has encountered, and also finds the cue leading the development of a future medical humanities education reformed with more historical and sociocultural contingencies.

Project ID:PF10608-0963
External Project ID:MOST106-2511-S182-006-MY2