The attitudes of Kerman medical school interns toward social medicine course

Interns’ attitude has strong association with their experience and judgment. It is actually one of the effective factors influencing the development and modification of medical education. The present study was carried out in order to compare the attitude of interns before and after the training course of social medicine. In this quasi-experimental study data was gathered by using a questionnaire with internal consistency coefficient of 0.86% and 0.89% respectively before and after the course. Interns were selected via conveniencesampling. Interns filled out pretest (before taking the course) and post test (after taking the course) questionnaires and the results were compared and analyzed through parametric and nonparametric tests. A total of100 students participated in the study. There was significant difference in mean of attitude score between pretest and post test results (P<0.05). In order to compare the rank of each attitude item in the two stages, ‘Sign test” was used. All 27 items showed significant difference (P<0.05). No significant difference was observed between two sexes in both pre and post tests. According to the results of the present study, researchers found out that social medicine training courses had considerable effects on interns’ attitude and could cause alterations in their attitude toward social medicine objectives.