The moral dimension of professional socialization in the premedical years

Recent medical sociology scholarship has highlighted the importance of the premedical years for shaping students' career expectations and trajectories. We advance research on professional socialization in the premedical years by elucidating its moral dimension through an investigation of how students prepare to take situational judgment tests, an application requirement introduced in the United States over the past ten years. These tests present students with challenging scenarios that often contain a moral dilemma. Drawing on qualitative analysis of online forum discussions of test scenarios (12 scenarios and 150 comments), we describe how premedical students negotiate the medical profession's expectations of them as moral actors. We find that students collectively negotiate the appropriateness of test responses in online forum discussions. Premedical students draw distinctions between how they would respond to test scenarios versus act “in real life” and attempt to collectively figure out what types of responses will help medical schools perceive them as good future doctors. Students also display frustration at the position such tests ask them to take vis-à-vis scenarios that present social problems or ask them to adhere to organizational policies or rules that students find to be overly interventionist. Our findings highlight the moral dimension of professional socialization, bringing sociology of health professions education into conversation with recent work on the sociology of morality.