Quality of Life of Medical Students on a Course that Adopts Active Teaching-Learning Methods

ABSTRACT The quality of life (QoL) of medical students has been the subject of studies, but we did not find any works in the literature that assess the QoL of students of medical schools that exclusively adopt active teaching methods. This study therefore evaluates quality of life in students from the 1st to 4th year of medical school at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos. The complete version WHOQoL-100 questionnaire was used as the data collection instrument, translated and validated for Portuguese. This questionnaire evaluates six domains, in addition to global QoL. All 182 students enrolled from the 1st to 4th year were interviewed. Four students were excluded from the sample due to incomplete filling out of the questionnaire, resulting in five groups: a control group with 32 students recently admitted to medical college; 1st year group with 38 students who had just completed the 1st year; a 2nd year group with 35 students who had just completed the 2nd year; a 3rd year group with 35 students who had just completed the 3rd year; and a 4th year group with 38 students who had just completed the 4th year. Descriptive analysis of the results was presented as means ± SEM. The significance of the differences was determined by analysis of variance followed by the Newman-Keuls multiple comparison test. For the correlation analysis, the Spearman correlation method was used. The level of significance was set at 5%. Global QoL showed a better score in the control group (77.54 ± 2.153) followed, in descending order, by the 2nd year (65.71 ± 3.923), 4th year (65.63 ± 3.306), 1st year (65.46 ± 3.289) and 3rd year (52.86 ± 2.766). There was a significant difference in the Global QoL for the 3rd year group in relation to the others (p <0.05). Among all the evaluated domains, the psychological domain had a significant influence on QoL, presenting strong correlation in the 1st to the 4th year groups.