A word-count approach to analyze linguistic patterns in the reflective writings of medical students

Abstract

BackgroundTeaching reflection and administering reflective writing assignments to students are widely practiced and discussed in medical education and health professional education. However, little is known about how medical students use language to construct their narratives. Exploring students’ linguistic patterns in their reflective writings can facilitate understanding the scope and facets of their reflections and their representational or communication approaches to share their experiences. Moreover, research findings regarding gender differences in language use are inconsistent. Therefore, we attempted to examine how females and males differ in their use of words in reflective writing within our research circumstance to detect the unique and gender-specific approaches to learning and their applications.MethodsWe analyzed the linguistic profiles of psychological process categories in the reflective writings of medical students and examined the difference in word usage between male and female medical students. During the first year of a clinical rotation, 60 fifth-year medical students wrote reflective narratives regarding pediatric patients and the psychosocial challenges faced by the patients and their family members. The narratives were analyzed using the Chinese version of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (CLIWC), a text analysis software program. Multivariate procedures were applied for statistical analysis.ResultsCognitive words were most pervasive, averaging 22.16%, whereas perceptual words (2.86%) were least pervasive. Female students used more words related to positive emotions and sadness than did male students. The male students exceeded the female students only in the space category. The major limitation of this study is that CLIWC cannot directly acquire contextual text meanings; therefore, depending on the research topic, further qualitative study of the given texts might be necessary.ConclusionsTo enhance students’ empathy toward the psychosocial issues faced by patients and their family members, students should be encouraged to explore the domain of psychological processes by identifying and expressing their affective and perceptual experiences. Researchers in future studies should use outcome measures such as self-awareness or empathy to determine the overall effectiveness of reflective writing and how changes in linguistic patterns affect such outcomes.

Gender and language use in scientific grant writing

“…LIWC software is widely used in the social sciences and has been parameterized across many different genres of writing, including scientific journal articles (Pennebaker et al 2007), with the current version capturing, on average, over 86% of the words used in written text and speech (Pennebaker et al 2015). Studies using LIWC have successfully detected gender differences in language in emails, narrative essays, and text excerpts from psychological studies (Newman et al 2008;Cheng et al 2011;Lin et al 2016). LIWC is comprised of a large dictionary of words and compares inputted written text to its dictionary to generate scores for n = 92 language variables including word count, words per sentence, 86 traditional variables (e.g., content and style words), and four summary variables that are described below (Pennebaker et al 2015).…”

“…The untapped potential of fully trained and credentialed female scientists limits advances in basic and applied research, and these limitations represent an Written gendered language differences (e.g., written language characteristics associated with a particular sex or social gender) have been documented in nonscientific (Newman et al 2008) and scientific contexts (Tse and Hyland 2008). For example, in reflective writing (e.g., narrative essays), female medical students used more words related to positive emotions than male students, and male medical students wrote longer documents compared with female students (Lin et al 2016). It is currently unknown if differences in gendered language use in scientific grant writing exist, and no direct investigation of language use and gender for senior-level funding applications in STEM has been conducted.…”

Reflective writing analytics

“…This could lead to a better understanding of how reflection is expressed all over the world. The work of Kann and Högfeldt [8] and Lin et al [10] points in this direction.…”

“…Kann and Högfeldt [8] used several dictionaries for a longitudinal study of reflective writings. Lin et al [10] leveraged the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool, which is a system built on top of several dictionaries. They used it to research how different genders used specific words in reflective writings.…”

Discourse through Photovoice: “Lived experience” of epilepsy

“…Reflection helps to explore experiences and these experiences help students to enhance their psychological well-being and their abilities to empathize with patients and themselves by enabling them to access and accept their feelings. Language changes could be the result in deepened critical thinking [12].…”