Dimensions of Existential, Relatedness and Growth (ERG) Needs of Medical Students for Rural Posting: An Analytical Study

Abstract

The retention of rural doctors in India is a very big challenge. Despite the mandatory rural postings, year by year rural health statistics indicate an abysmal picture of rural doctors’ vacancies and their shortfalls in many states. Various studies stipulate that rural doctors are quitting rural postings; the reasons are job dissatisfaction, lack of physical facilities, and the dearth of educational exposure for children, low advancements opportunities, etc. A reliable instrument to identify the motivational needs of doctors towards their rural postings, suitable to Indian context is the need of the hour for both policymakers and doctors alike. So, this study aims to acquire the reliability of the Existential, relatedness, and Growth needs of Doctors’ questionnaire and to obtain the dimensions of needs as an initial attempt. An ERG motivational need questionnaire was developed to determine the needs of medical students and doctors to practice in rural areas of India. A literature search and pilot study with 203 medical students were carried out and appropriate items were extracted. This study was conducted in Jaipur, Chennai, and Pondicherry with 203 medical students. The developed questionnaire was initially with 58 items and reduction of items was done through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). The reliability of the instrument was measured using internal consistency reliability, by Cronbach alpha coefficient. The instrument is developed with three constructs namely Existential needs (EN), Relatedness Needs (RN), and Growth Needs (GN) with a 5-point Likert scale. The exploratory factor analysis after five rotations converged to 10 factors with 65.971% of the total variance and 0.855 Kaiser-Meyer- Olkin index indicating sampling adequacy. The initial 58 items were reduced by 32 items in the final questionnaire. Factor loading ranged from 0.439- 0.797, consequently the 10 factors were labelled, and their reliability scores are 0.794, 0.782, 0.760, 0.708, 0.788, 0.802, 0.711, 0.615, 0.645, and 0.525. The result obtained has proven that the extracted 10 factors have good reliability to obtain the dimensions of Existential, relatedness, and growth needs. The study results have implications in addressing the problem of rural doctors’ shortage.