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Another Feel-Good Diversity Study

The Journal of the American Medical Association has an article summarizing a new study lauding the benefits of ?diversity? in medical association.

The study set out ?[t]o determine whether student body racial and ethnic diversity is associated with diversity-related outcomes among US medical students.? And ? you will no doubt find this shocking ? the authors did find that student body racial and ethnic diversity is associated with a ?diversity-related outcome.?

What outcome was that, you ask? It?s a real shocker: white students at schools with more ?diversity? rate themselves better able to care for ?diverse? patients than white students at less ?diverse? schools, at least when and if their school emphasizes the importance of caring for diverse patients.

Really. Here?s the results summary from the article:

White students within the highest quintile for student body racial and ethnic diversity, measured by the proportion of underrepresented minority (URM) students, were more likely to rate themselves as highly prepared to care for minority populations than those in the lowest diversity quintile (61.1% vs 53.9%, respectively; P <.001; adjusted odds ratio [OR], 1.33; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.13-1.57). This association was strongest in schools in which students perceived a positive climate for interracial interaction. White students in the highest URM quintile were also more likely to have strong attitudes endorsing equitable access to care (54.8% vs 44.2%, respectively; P < 001; adjusted OR, 1.42; 95% CI, 1.15-1.74).

There was no similar result for ?nonwhite students,? nor was there any association between students rating themselves highly on their ?diversity? skills and plans to practice in areas with many ?diverse? patients.

Student body URM proportions were not associated with white or nonwhite students' plans to practice in underserved communities, although URM students were substantially more likely than white or nonwhite/non-URM students to plan to serve the underserved (48.7% vs 18.8% vs 16.2%, respectively; P <.001).

The researchers claim, of course, that their study provides empirical support for the importance of ?diversty? in medical education, but I?m not sure their method tells us much more than we?d learn asking, say, history majors whether they think history is important.

In his trademark fair and balances manner, Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education also implicitly raises a nunber of questions in his article about the study today. The authors acknowledge, he writes, ?that the outcomes observed in the study may have not been the result of diversity on campuses.?

?It is possible that students more interested in diverse and underserved populations chose schools with greater student body diversity and that these pre-existing attitudes rather than the medical school experience accounted for the observed outcomes,? the article says. ?It is also possible that schools that recruit a diverse student body are committed to improving diversity-related outcomes and that this type of school commitment rather than diversity per se accounted for our findings.?

Noting that their study was unable to measure the racial and ethnic composition of the patient population to which students were exposed, the researchers said it is also possible that those medical schools with the most diverse student bodies also serve the most diverse patient populations, and that exposure to patient diversity is what brought about the educational outcomes reported.

In an interview on Tuesday, Dr. [Somnath] Saha [lead researcher and associate professor of medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University] said the study?s findings correlating positive educational outcomes with medical schools? promotion of interracial understanding led him to believe that such outcomes were the result of something occurring at the schools, independent of students? backgrounds. ?How is this operating? We need more work to figure it out,? he said. ?We only have the 30,000-foot view here.?

I haven?t read the whole article, much less the study itself, but it seems to me that the only ?positive educational outcome? they found was that white students at diverse medical schools rated themselves as better able to care for minority populations than students at less diverse schools. I?m not sure that?s an ?educational outcome,? or a very important one if it is.

Full post as published by Discriminations on September 10, 2008 (boomark / email).