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Medical Students’ Quality of Life and Its Association with Harassment and Social Support

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Abstract

Objectives

To explore the associations between self-reported quality of life (QoL) and harassment and the potential moderating effect of social support.

Design

Senior medical students were invited to participate in a survey consisting of a background section, the World Health Organisation QoL questionnaire (New Zealand version), a version of the generalised workplace harassment questionnaire, and the multidimensional scale of perceived social support. A series of multivariate statistical analyses were conducted.

Results

Two hundred and five students completed the online survey (response rate = 25%). The findings indicated a high incidence of verbal (90%) and covert harassment (87%), with relatively low levels of physical harassment (6%) and manipulation (6%). The correlational analyses indicated that low levels of QoL were associated with high levels of verbal and covert harassment and high levels of social support were directly associated with high levels of QoL. The moderation models indicated that social support conditionally influences the impact of verbal and covert harassment on social and psychological QoL.

Conclusions

These findings imply that medical students experiencing harassment in clinical learning environments likely experienced lowered levels of QoL. Social support may moderate, in certain instances, the adverse impact of harassment on QoL.

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Availability of Data and Material

The anonymised data that supports the findings of this study are openly available in the Figshare repository, https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Medical_students_quality_of_life_and_its_association_with_harassment_and_social_support/14776692

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Medical and Health Sciences Education, University of Auckland, Building 507, Grafton, Auckland, 1023, New Zealand

    Marcus A. Henning, Yan Chen, Ties Coomber & Craig S. Webster

  2. School of Medicine, University of Auckland, Grafton, Auckland, 1023, New Zealand

    Josephine Stonyer & Benjamin Alsop-ten Hove

  3. Department of General Practice and Primary Healthcare, Population Health, University of Auckland, Grafton, Auckland, 1023, New Zealand

    Fiona Moir

Authors
  1. Marcus A. Henning
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  2. Josephine Stonyer
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  3. Yan Chen
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  4. Benjamin Alsop-ten Hove
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  5. Fiona Moir
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  6. Ties Coomber
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  7. Craig S. Webster
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Contributions

MAH conceptualised and supervised the study. JS was integral to the development of the study and organising survey collection. All authors were responsible for preparation, review, and editing of the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree with the order of presentation of authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marcus A. Henning.

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Ethics Approval

Ethics approval for the collection and use of data was sought and obtained from the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (Ref. 023525).

Informed Consent

All authors gave their informed consent for inclusion as participating authors.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Henning, M.A., Stonyer, J., Chen, Y. et al. Medical Students’ Quality of Life and Its Association with Harassment and Social Support. Med.Sci.Educ. 32, 165–174 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-021-01463-z

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