Job Preferences of Undergraduate Pharmacy Students in China: A Discrete Choice Experiment

Abstract

Background: Pharmacists are a crucial part of the health workforce and playing important role in achieving universal health coverage. In China, pharmaceutical human resources are in short and the distribution is unequal. This study aimed to identify the key job characteristics that influence the job preferences of undergraduate pharmacy students and to elicit the relative importance of different job characteristics to shed lights on future policy intervention.Methods: A discrete choice experiment was conducted to elicit the job preferences of undergraduate pharmacy students from 6 provinces in mainland China. A face-to-face interview was used to collect data. Conditional logit and mixed logit models were used to analyze data and the final model was chosen according to the model fit statistics. A series of policy simulation was also conducted.Results: In total, 581 respondents completed the questionnaire and 500 respondents who passed the internal consistency test were analyzed. All attributes were statistically significant except for open management. Monthly income and work location were most important to respondents, followed by work unit (which refers to the nature of workplace) and years to promotion. There exists preference heterogeneity among respondents, e.g. male students preferred open management and female students preferred a job in private institutions. Furthermore, students with an urban background or from a single-child family placed higher values on a job in the city as compared to their counterparts. Conclusion: The heterogeneity of attributes showed the complexity of job preferences. Both monetary and non-monetary job characteristics significantly influenced the job preferences of pharmacy students in China. A more effective policy intervention to attact graduates to work in rural areas should consider both incentives on the job itself as well as the background of pharmacy school graduates.

Assessing the Psychometric Properties of the Chinese Version of Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) Among Medical College Students

“…The recruitment processes varied by each major of the students and all details have been reported in previous publications for students majoring in medicine, health management, nursing, and pharmacy. [23][24][25][26] In brief, a multistage sampling design was used. First, according to the geographical location and the economic development level, 11 provinces were selected which were located in the east (Beijing, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu), middle (Henan, Shanxi), west (Shaanxi, Ningxia, Gansu), and northeast of China (Heilongjiang, Liaoning) (Figure S1).…”