Evaluation of family medicine residents' reflection skills

While reflection skills have been extensively studied in undergraduate medical education, research on the reflection skills of residents remains limited in the Turkish literature. Therefore, a two-phase study was conducted. In the first phase, a methodological study adapted the Groningen Reflection Ability Scale (GRAS) for residents. In the second phase, a cross-sectional study assessed the reflection skills of family medicine (FM) residents using the adapted scale, examining reflection ability scores across gender, seniority, and institution type.

GRAS has been translated into Turkish. Firstly, the Turkish version was administered to 230 residents from various specialties. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run, Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega coefficients were calculated. Then, the adapted scale was administered to 336 FM residents in Turkey. Skewness and kurtosis coefficients were calculated, and the Shapiro-Wilk test was applied to examine normality. Group comparisons were conducted using the Mann-Whitney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis H test.

In the first phase, GRAS-TR-pg with 20-item, single-dimension and three-factor structure has been validated for use with Turkish residents. Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega coefficients were found to be sufficient. In the second phase, there were no significant differences in the scores received, based on various variables.

This study reveals that the adapted GRAS-TR-pg can serve as a valid and reliable tool to measure the reflective skills of residents in Turkey. No significant differences found based on various variables regarding the reflection skill levels of Turkish FM residents.