F.W. Hafferty is professor of medical education, Division of General Internal Medicine, Program in Professionalism and Values, and College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5604-7268. D. Grbic is lead research analyst for medical education, Association of American Medical Colleges, Washington, DC. P.K. Hafferty is gallery assistant and administrator, Koichi Yanagi Oriental Fine Arts, New York, New York.
Acad Med. 2019 May;94(5):723-730. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000002626.
Mission statements (MSs) express an organization's purpose and reflect the broader social environment in which they function. The authors analyze MS text to explore how medical schools can be relationally viewed and how particular thematic narratives within MSs can be deployed to associate schools in hithertofore unexplored ways.
The authors analyzed the MSs (as of 1/1/2017) of 144 U.S. Liaison Committee on Medical Education-accredited schools. Using schools as their unit of analysis, they coded MSs using 44 themes. They employed content analysis to identify themes within MSs, factor analysis to identify core thematic dimensions embedded in MSs, and network analysis to examine relationships among schools based on these thematic dimensions. The authors used four standard school characteristics to examine the validity of their results.
Content analysis revealed 20 core themes. Factor analysis identified four thematic dimensions: Primary Care/Diversity; Future Learning-External; Traditional; and Learning Environment-Internal. Based on the 20 core themes and using the MSs of 125 schools with nonextreme MS code counts, the authors found that schools form a complete network, and that schools form distinctive network-based clusters based on the identified factors. The four thematic dimensions were significantly differentiated across the four standard school characteristics.
The authors found distinctive patterns of MS linkages among schools along with thematic linkages within MS themes, supporting the contentions that medical schools can be both differentiated and connected based on their MSs and that understanding MS content must move beyond simple frequency counts of MS attributes.
使命陈述（MS）表达了组织的宗旨，并反映了其运作的更广泛的社会环境。作者分析了 MS 文本，以探讨如何从关系的角度看待医学院校，以及如何利用 MS 中的特定主题叙述以迄今为止尚未探索的方式将学校联系起来。
作者分析了 144 所美国联络委员会医学教育认证学校的 MS（截至 1/1/2017）。使用学校作为其分析单位，他们使用 44 个主题对 MS 进行了编码。他们采用内容分析法识别 MS 中的主题，采用因子分析法识别 MS 中嵌入的核心主题维度，并采用网络分析法根据这些主题维度来考察学校之间的关系。作者使用了四个标准学校特征来检验他们的结果的有效性。
内容分析揭示了 20 个核心主题。因子分析确定了四个主题维度：初级保健/多样性；未来学习-外部；传统；和学习环境-内部。基于 20 个核心主题，并使用没有极端 MS 代码计数的 125 所学校的 MS，作者发现学校形成了一个完整的网络，并且根据识别出的因素，学校形成了独特的基于网络的集群。四个主题维度在四个标准学校特征上有显著差异。
作者发现了学校之间的 MS 链接以及 MS 主题内的主题链接的独特模式，这支持了以下观点，即医学学校可以根据其 MS 进行区分和联系，并且对 MS 内容的理解必须超越对 MS 属性的简单频率计数。
