Explicit motives and personality characteristics in first year medical students: a multicentre quantitative study using McClellands motive disposition theory

Abstract

Abstract Background Despite the challenging curriculum, medicine is a popular study program. We propose McClelland’s Motive Disposition Theory (MDT) as a possible theory for explaining medical students motivation. The theory describes how individuals differ in their behaviour due to their varying manifestations of certain motives. The three motives can thus influence the students behaviour and academic success. Using these motives, complimented with an altruism- and a freedom motive, this study was aimed at investigating young adults’ explicit motives to study medicine. In addition, we also wanted to find out whether there are gender differences in motives and other variables such as empathy, emotional intelligence and academic self-concept. Methods Over 20 universities across Germany were contacted and asked to share the online study with their first semester medical students in the winter term 2022/23, which resulted in a final N = 535. We used validated and reliable measurements, including a self-created and piloted questionnaire covering medicine-specific explicit motives. Results Comparing the mean scores between motives, we found that the altruism motive was the strongest motive (M = 5.19), followed by freedom (M = 4.88), affiliation (M = 4.72) and achievement (M = 4.59). The power motive achieved the lowest score (M = 3.92). Male students scored significantly higher for power (M = 4.24) than females did (M = 3.80, p < .001), while female students found affiliation more important (M = 4.81) than male students did (M = 4.59, p = .016). Female participants scored significantly higher for emotional intelligence (p = .010) and several personality aspects, including empathy (p < .001), but showed a significantly lower academic self-concept (p = .033), compared to their male colleagues. Nonetheless, the effect sizes were mostly small to medium. Conclusions Our findings suggest that first-year medical students are primarily motivated by humanitarian factors to study medicine, compared to motives related to money or power. This is mostly in line with earlier studies using qualitative approaches, showing that MDT can be applied to explain explicit motives in medical students. Trial registration The longitudinal project, which this study was part of, was registered via OSF (https://archive.org/details/osf-registrations-mfhek-v1) on the 28th of September 2022 under the title “Transformation of emotion and motivation factors in medical students during the study progress: A multicenter longitudinal study”.