Senior medical students' attitudes toward choosing residency programs in primary care

To investigate the associations between medical students' first choice for their graduate medical education specialty (primary care versus non-primary care) and both their sociodemographic characteristics and their perceptions of the importance of 44 factors related to that choice, we conducted a survey of the 1982 senior medical students at the three medical schools in Louisiana. The major differences that we found between the students choosing primary care residency programs and those choosing non-primary care programs included the following: the primary care group was much more likely to be married; to have resided in smaller communities during their childhood, high school, and premedical school years; to have made their decision on a specialty prior to medical school; and to place less importance on hospital reputation, quality of facilities, and up-to-date equipment in choosing a graduate medical program. No differences between the two groups were found for the following variables: whether or not they had children; whether or not they had resided in Louisiana during early childhood, high school, or premedical school; and whether or not they had resided in the South for those same time periods. Although the primary care group had a higher proportion of women than the non-primary care group, the difference was not statistically significant.