Role-model concepts before and after the formal professional socialization period

Physical therapy students in baccalaureate-degree programs used a forced-choice Q sort of 49 characteristics of physical therapists to describe their concepts of a physical therapy role model at the beginning and again at the end of basic professional training. In ranking the items with the 10 highest mean values (most descriptive) for each sorting, two items represented technical and eight items represented personal characteristics. The same nine items remained highest for both Q sorts. In comparing the high-ranking items to those rankings of sortings performed by recent graduates and by physical therapists, six items were the same. The majority of the correlations between the students' pretraining and posttraining Q-sort scores were significant, with moderate degrees of correlation. The investigator concluded that physical therapy students' role-model concepts were fairly similar before and after professional training. Personal, rather than technical, characteristics best described the physical therapy role model.