Medical students’ quality of life and its association with harassment and social support

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 generalized 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.