66 - The Effect of Socioeconomic Status on Confidence and Performance of Medical Students

Poster Board Number: 66
There are separate poster presentation times for odd and even posters.
Odd poster #s – first hour
Even poster #s – second hour

Abstract Body : It goes without saying that everyone who practices medicine today comes from a diverse background including variance in race, age, sex, socioeconomic background, culture, and much more. Each factor comes with its own set of hurdles that can conflict with gaining a complete medical education. Medical training is extensive and difficult to achieve and has been proven to cause severe depression. Given the inherent difficulty of successfully getting a medical degree, our proposed research evaluates specifically how a difference in socioeconomic background could affect a student’s performance, confidence, and study habits in medical school. Given that a very small number of students in medical school belong to the lower quartile of income status could explain why currently, the literature regarding performance and socioeconomic status is sparse and typically focuses on how socioeconomic status relates to admission to medical school. Our research has had the means to look into a student’s performance as well as their confidence in becoming a good doctor. We were able to gauge if different students from different backgrounds with different educational backgrounds feel like they will make good doctors, if they have confidence in their ability, and if that relates to their outcomes and performance. The research question this project thrived to achieve specifically is: is there a difference in performance, confidence, and study habits that can be attributed to advantages related to high- vs middle- or low- socioeconomic status. The subjects of this study are the MD only from Saint Joseph and Health Science District and BA/MD students of the graduating class of 2026 during their tenure in the Medical Neuroscience course: BMS 9310. The data is collected during each exam during the Medical Neuroscience course where a plethora of questions will be asked regarding if the student thinks they will be a good doctor, what their study habits are, what socioeconomic bracket they belong to, and we will also gauge their performance on exams over time. By collecting this data, we were able to associate confidence, study habits, and performance with socioeconomic advantage. We discovered that there is no statistical significance (P=0.17) between socioeconomic status and performance on exams. Further research should include more individuals and should take into account a larger subset of courses.