The development of a professional role orientation inventory

This paper describes the development and testing of the Professional Role Orientation Inventory, a 40-item Likert-type instrument designed to assess a dentist's perception of his or her professional role. The test includes four 10-item scales representing four attitudinal dimensions: Authority, Responsibility, Agency, and Autonomy. The study describes differences between and among groups of professionals and dental students who took the test. Responses to the various scales suggest that practitioners do have different conceptualizations of their professional role, though these conceptions vary somewhat from the various models of professionalism described in the literature.