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An interactive patient simulation for the study of medical decision‐making
Author(s) -
GERRITSMA J. G. M.,
SMAL J. A.
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
medical education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.776
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1365-2923
pISSN - 0308-0110
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2923.1988.tb00421.x
Subject(s) - construct (python library) , realism , construct validity , homogeneous , medical decision making , psychology , medical education , medicine , family medicine , computer science , psychometrics , clinical psychology , mathematics , epistemology , philosophy , combinatorics , programming language
Summary. An interactive patient simulation for the study of medical decision‐making was developed which is basically a flexible question and answer simulation between a doctor and a simulator conducting the simulation. To insure a thorough insight into the management of cases over time, provisions were made for doctors to interact with the simulated patients as many as five times. The simulation was tested on 16 family doctors and 16 specialist physicians to evaluate its realism and construct validity. The realism scores were highly favourable for both groups. With regard to construct validity, the hypothesis that the two speciality groups would manifest themselves in decision‐making as distinct and homogeneous groups was tested. This hypothesis was confirmed in the case of specialist physicians, but not in the case of family doctors.