Medical schools can assist students by providing them with quality career counseling to help them choose a medical specialty. Many schools use interest inventories to help identify students’ specialty interests. This study examined the predictive validity of one such inventory, the Medical Specialty Preference Inventory (MSPI). In a longitudinal design, we used discriminant function analysis to examine how well students’ scores on the MSPI fit their chosen medical specialty one year later. The MSPI correctly predicted students’ future medical specialty choice 58.1% of the time. These results can help career advisors interpret MSPI scores, and identify students’ most likely medical specialty choice, as well as their second most likely choice.
Medical students’ specialty choice constitutes an important personal decision with far reaching consequences for individuals, and their families. Obtaining a medical degree requires the student to invest significant personal and economic resourses, and to delay transitions to work and family roles. State governments invest enormous resources to subsidize medical education at state institutions, and students mortgage their future to pay for the high costs of a medical education. Consequently, medical care providers, medical school faculty and staff, and students’ families encourage medical students to think proactively and carefully about their future medical specialty choice.
Medical students choose a specialty for a variety of reasons, including experiences and exposure in medical school, academic performance in relevant clinical clerkships, personality attributes, and ratings of the content of medical practice (Reed, Jernstedt, & Reber, 2001). Unfortunately, students must often make this life-changing choice with inadequate information. Medical specialty counseling has developed over time to assist students in making specialty choices. Some career advisors use the Medical Specialty Preference Inventory (MSPI: Zimny, 1979) to facilitate the decision-making process.
The MSPI is an assessment of students’ specialty interests and is used to inform their choice of medical specialty. In addition, the instrument can be used to assist physicians who are considering a medical specialty change at some point during residency. The original MSPI consisted of 199 items pertaining to medical activities and settings. Zimny (1979) asked a sample of physicians in each of six major medical specialties (Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Surgery) to rate the extent to which each item from the MSPI was characteristic of general practice in their specialties. This method avoided the inherent problem in using generic interests, which may co-vary across specialties, and therefore, fail to distinguish clearly between them. The authors considered this approach to be favorable because it relates the characteristics of the practice of the specialties themselves rather than the characteristics of the physicians who practice in those specialties. Subsequently, it compares the medical activities that students prefer to the activities that physician’s in that specialty perform.
This approach has received support from the literature. Savickas, Brizzi, Brisbin, and Pethtel (1988) compared the predictive validity of the MSPI with another medical specialty preference inventory, the Medical Specialty Preference Scales (MSPS: Gough, 1979). Whereas the MSPI uses practitioner-based scales and contains items related to actual medical practice, the MSPS uses student-based scales and contains generic interest items. The results from two consecutive medical student cohorts found that the MSPI successfully predicted a student’s specialty 59% of the time, whereas the MSPS successfully predicted a student’s specialty 19% of the time. Furthermore, the prediction rate for the MSPS only slightly exceeded what one would expect to see by chance alone. These results suggest that practitioner-based scales containing items related to specific medical practice predict students’ medical specialty choice better than student-based scales containing generic interest items.
The current study employed the MSPI 2nd edition, which Zimny revised and updated in 2002 (Zimny, 2002). This revision brought about a number of important changes including a reduction in the number of items and subscales. Although previous research demonstrated the strong predictive validity of the original version of the MSPI, the predictive power of the updated version has not been tested. Therefore, this study investigated the predictive validity of the MSPI 2nd edition.
