Evidence map›Paper›PMID 31637350›Full record

ArticleAEM education and training2019

Navigating Cognitive Dissonance: A Qualitative Content Analysis Exploring Medical Students' Experiences of Moral Distress in the Emergency Department.

Caitlin Schrepel, Joshua Jauregui, Alisha Brown, Jamie Shandro, Jared Strote

Open access · greenAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in AEM education and training, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
11citing papers in PubMed
3.3field-weighted citation impact, top 8% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

11 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Reengineering the Concept of Emergency Care.Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine · 2026
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  8. Misdiagnosis: Burnout, moral injury, and implications for the electronic health record.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2021
    Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Caitlin SchrepelDepartment of Emergency Medicine University of Washington Seattle WA.
Joshua JaureguiDepartment of Emergency Medicine University of Washington Seattle WA.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4741-0296
Alisha BrownDepartment of Emergency Medicine University of Washington Seattle WA.
Jamie ShandroDepartment of Emergency Medicine University of Washington Seattle WA.
Jared StroteDepartment of Emergency Medicine University of Washington Seattle WA.
University of Washington · US

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundAs undergraduate medical students are acculturated into clinical practice, they develop a set of refined professional values that impact their decision making. We aimed to use students' reflective narratives on ethical dilemmas to identify how students experience moral distress while working in the emergency department (ED) to better understand how to support them in the development of their own agency to act ethically.

methodsStudents rotating in our emergency medicine clerkship are required to submit an essay describing an ethical dilemma they encountered. We selected a random sample of these reflective pieces from the 2015 and 2016 academic years and used an exploratory qualitative thematic analytic approach to identify frequently recurring themes. This process was continued until thematic sufficiency was reached.

resultsTwo-hundred essays were coded, and seven unique themes were identified. The moral distress students described in reflective writing narratives stemmed from patient-provider discord, uncertainty, and social injustices. In each case, students were expressing the cognitive dissonance they experienced as they began to reconcile the difference between their perceptions of optimal patient care and the actual care delivered to the patient.

conclusionUnderstanding medical students' cognitive dissonance in the ED will help educators support their students as they negotiate the differences between preferences and principles while being acculturated into clinical practice. Future work should develop specific interventions to promote educator understanding of learners' moral distress and to develop novel models of support for learners.

Identifiers

PMID31637350
PMCPMC6795361
OpenAlexW2966406033

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.