Rebecca Volpe, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine, and Director of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Service for the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and asks the question: “Does the research on professional identity formation suffer from sociocultural bias? Early insights from a scoping review and metasynthesis”.

Professional identity formation (PIF) is the foundational process of transformation from a lay person to a clinician. We set out to look at the empirical literature on PIF in medicine, nursing and counseling psychology. While reading thousands of abstracts, we realized that the vast majority of the studies we read did not consider demographic data such as race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status as important to PIF. We believe it is possible that the empirical research on PIF suffers from sociocultural bias, thereby disadvantaging trainees from non-normative populations and preserving the status quo of historically white, male medical culture.

A reception will be held prior to the talk from 4:00 – 4:30pm, Volpe will begin at 4:30pm. Both will take place in the Bangor Room in the Memorial Union.