Use of Q-Technique to Examine Attitudes of Entering Pharmacy Students Toward Their Profession

The purpose of this study was to qualify pharmacy students' subjective motivations for seeking a professional degree. Essays composed and submitted by student applicants to the UIC College of Pharmacy were used as a concourse from which a naturalistic representative sample of statements (0-set) was selected regarding perceptions of pharmacy as a profession. Students identified by data obtained from the Dean of Student Affairs Office as belonging to "high academic performance" and "low academic performance" groups after one and two semesters of pharmacy education were selected for the person sample (P-set). Factored 0-sorts produced six distinct sets of attitudes operationally defined as exhibiting clinical, family, science, undecided, traditional community, and altruistic orientations. Characteristics of the factors are described and compared with regard to issues of importance and unimportance to the students as well as the extent to which these attitude representations can be used to capture the larger picture of an important credentialled health profession undergoing rapid changes in the past two decades.