"Finish the story…": Qualitative story completion research methods in medical education

Medical Education (ME) research seeks to understand and improve teaching and learning in medicine. It often explores sensitive topics related to the culture of medical education, such as the hidden curriculum, power dynamics, discrimination, bias, cultural competence, ethical dilemmas, and clinical errors. Expanding available ME research methods, we introduce qualitative story completion.

Qualitative story completion is a research method originating in psychology, where participants are given the start of a fictional story (a "story stem") and are asked to complete the story. This method is particularly suited to exploring cultural understandings, social norms, and assumptions. Literature on utilizing this method within ME research remains scarce. In this methodological paper, we provide ME researchers and scholars with an overview of the history of the method, its theoretical foundations, practical steps in study design, and this method's implications for ME. By doing so, we hope to highlight the potential merit of this method in ME research and equip researchers to use qualitative story completion in their own work to uncover aspects of medical culture that otherwise remain hidden.

Qualitative story completion is a flexible, rigorous, and unexplored method well-suited to understanding complex educational interventions and dynamics in ME research due to its third-person and fictional nature. Approaching ME research with the qualitative story completion method will allow researchers to gain novel insights into societal understandings and cultural discourses.