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KCE Reports 90 Making General Practice Attractive: Encouraging GP attraction and Retention 31
Three sub-questions define the scope of the research:
3.4 METHODS
• Which factors are related to specialty choice before medical school?
• Which factors are related to specialty choice during medical education?
• Which factors do attract students in the GP profession in Belgium?
Qualitative interviews were first performed. The qualitative survey method is indeed an
appropriate method to make an inventory and describe ideas, experiences and actual
behavior of a population 127 , 128 . The results of this qualitative study were complemented
with a quantitative approach that allowed triangulating the results.
3.4.1 Qualitative interview study
The focus of the interview was to explore the reasons for choosing or not choosing
general practice as a career and to get an insight in the process of choice.
3.4.1.1 Qualitative instrument
The data were collected by semi-structured interviews based on an interview guide
(interview protocol). Three different researchers conducted semi-structured interviews
with students allowed a standardization of the process as the interviews. The use of an
interview guide also supported tackling the important topics in each interview by all
interviewers.
After a standardized introduction 128 , the interview guide had open-ended questions
(see appendix 3.2. and 3.3.). In this way the interviewees had enough space to tell their
stories, but on the other hand this method ensured a comparable approach by the 3
interviewers.
The chronological natural process of specialty choice was the frame of the interview
guide 21 : characteristics, attitudes and intentions before entering medical school;
experiences during and with the medical curriculum, and the final career choice. So the
interview guide was divided in three major parts and students were encouraged to go
over and to talk about the elements having influenced their decision during these
phases.
During the pilot interviews remembering was not easy and students reconstructed
these elements again throughout the interview. Questions regarding the process of
choice were repeated but with different wording or from a different angle to give the
interviewees the opportunity to add elements or to go more in depth 127 .
The initial interview guide was developed in Dutch and then translated into French by
the French-speaking interviewer. This draft version was adapted after feedback from the
steering group and 3 pilot interviews (2 in Dutch, 1 in French). The major adaptation
was the deletion of the section on choice of university because this part did not provide
any useful information during the pilot interviews.
A translator, not involved in the project, performed the back translation. A few small
(words) corrections were made to the interview guide following this back translation.
3.4.1.2 Participants
A purposeful sample of 24 (12 in Flanders and 12 in Walloon) seventh year medical
students in Belgium was recruited. The choice of seventh year students allowed to
recruit students at the end of their ‘choice trajectory’ i.e., interviewees able to provide
an information on the whole choice process.