Diagnosis
NOVEMBER 2021
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SYMPTOMS:
Within the medical field, there is a large gap of information about job satisfaction, especially in the US. Having this gap allows for medical professionals' job satisfaction to not have a great amount of importance. Not only is job satisfaction not researched, but malpractice cases also are not. Information about how many malpractice cases doctors face on average, the severity of the cases, and how they affect the doctors is not available.
Job satisfaction: Feelings of fulfilment or joy from one's career.
Malpractice: Negligent, illegal, or improper activity from a physician. These actions can lead to legal actions from the patient.
MEDICAL TESTS:
To narrow down what my research question should be, I had to go through a few different questions. My research started out with an extremely broad question: What are the effects of job satisfaction? I quickly learned that researching every effect was not feasible and an extremely large task. From here, I wanted to look into the medical field, which in turn led to the question "What is average the job satisfaction of doctors?". As I started to learn more about this topic, I struggled with how I would measure job satisfaction and what the importance of the research would be. I learned that malpractice cases could be used as a measurement of job performance, something I wanted to look at, and how it correlated with job satisfaction.
Once I finally reached my final research question, I realized I was about to struggle even more with roadblocks on my journey to job satisfaction. To answer my research question, I needed to determine the methodology. I researched previous studies that are similar to mine and found that surveys and interviews would be the simplest and more achievable. This means that I would have to receive an IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval.
CONFIRMING DIAGNOSIS - RECEIVING AN IRB APPROVAL
Starting my research had to wait until I received an IRB approval and confirmed that it would all work and was ethical. To receive IRB approval, all of the survey questions, interview questions, and sample emails needed to be written out. I spent time figuring out how to make my survey ethical and make sure that it follows all of the guidelines. One difficulty I had to work with was finding out how to make it all anonymous and that no identifiable information would be used. To ensure that I do this, I will be having another AP Research student delete the time and date stamps and ensure that the consent form and the actual survey cannot be linked in any way.
Not only was keeping my research ethical a long process I had to go through, but I also had to try and figure out how I can ensure that I will get enough responses. One of the limitations of my research is that I do not have unlimited resources when it comes to time and responses. To work around this, I will be asking surgeons that I know to help send it out and make sure that everything I send out is short and easy to answer.
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