Medical Student Stressful Scenarios Study
Stress is a known feature of medical studies as well as medical practice. In much of the literature stress is dealt with in the abstract, simply measuring levels of non-specific stress. In this project, however,…
Grant awarded by the Scottish Medical Education Research Consortium (SMERC)
We are delighted to have received a grant for just under £10,000 to progress the work on the link between different types of stressors and identity in the medical context into 2017. The project title…
Self and Identity Processes, Stress, and Resilience: Invited Talk
Symposium on Burnout and Resiliency in Medical Education Participants from across Scotland and further afield gathered in the Gateway building at St Andrews to discuss recent work on building resilience in medical education. The importance…
Project Research Publications

The complexity of medical education: Book chapter 2017
We are pleased to have a book chapter in the 2017 book on Self and Social Identity in Educational Contexts. The chapter examines several of…
Research Activities

Medical Student Stressful Scenarios Preliminary Research Study
Stress is a known feature of medical studies as well as medical practice. In much of the literature stress is dealt with…
Identity and Stress experienced in different specialties
We are conducting interviews internationally across a range of specialty…
Stressful events in medical practice
We are taking a different approach to looking at the…
Identity and Stress in Emergency Medicine and Oncology
We are running an interview-based study to focus on the…
Resources and External Reports

AMSA Mental Health website
The Australian Medical Students Association (AMSA) has been very active in promoting mental health and wellbeing issues in the last few years…
Mental Health Program (Australia)
National Mental Health Survey of Doctors and Medical Students Broad…
The Impact of the Working Time Regulations on Medical Education
Work time regulations have the potential to have an important…
Student Wellbeing – Keeping your grass greener
Keeping Your Grass Greener, the wellbeing guide for medical students is…
More Articles
Project group grows over Summer 2017
The summer of 2017 has been an exciting time for the project, with a new PhD student joining the team (Aisha Al-Sulaiti) and a Masters student (Malavika Subramanian) doing her thesis on a closely related topic. Caoimhe Ryan continues as our postdoctoral research fellow. Malavika’s…
Aisha Al-Sulaiti joins the project for her PhD
Aisha joins the project from the State of Qatar and will be examining identity and medical work-related stressors for doctors, trainees and medical students. She will also be expanding the questions to look at cultural identity in terms of training culture and/or host culture. The project…
Summer interns explore the way stress and identity interact in medical contexts
We were delighted to have four volunteer summer interns working with the lab over the summer – three from St Andrews and a guess all the way from Turkey! The group spend the majority of their time exploring the issues around identity and well-being in…
Bullying among Medical Professionals: Is Bullying by-product of medical identity?
by Gülşah Kurt (Project Intern 2016) Bullying is quite common phenomenon in medical education. More than one in three of the doctors report that they have been bullied at least once ( Quine, L., 2002) and bullying by a senior surgeon was the focus of…
Do norms create an expectation of stress and aversion to reporting distress?
by Cassie Lowery (Project Intern 2016) Medical identities of doctors and medical students tend to be quite strong. And while such strong identification with this identity has been shown to correlate with well being, there may be other, more negative, consequences. Identification with a group…
Caoimhe Ryan joins the project as Postdoctoral Fellow
Caoimhe Ryan has been appointed as a part time postdoctoral research fellow to help work on the project, starting in May 2016. A small pilot grant is supporting our initial interview study looking at Specialists in Emergency Medicine and Oncology. Caoimhe has a PhD in Social…
AMEE Symposium: Researching identities in medical education
Divergence & convergence across theoretical & analytical perspectives Ken Mavor was part of an international team presenting at AMEE in Glasgow. The symposium represented a wide range of research approaches looking at identities in medical education. The presenters included: Lynn Monrouxe (Chang Gung Medical Education Research…
Medical Student Social Identity and Wellbeing study
In 2013 and 2014 we conducted a study to examine some dimensions of medical student identity, social connections among medical students and wellbeing. We were pleased to have the participation from nearly 400 medical students, primarily in Australia and New Zealand, but also Europe and…
Pilot grant awarded by the School of Psychology and Neuroscience 2016
We are grateful to the School of Psychology and Neuroscience for supporting a pilot study to advance the project with a small grant of £3000. The grant is titled” The importance of self and identity for understanding the impact of stress and trauma”. The main focus…