Correlation between moral courage score and social desirability score of the medical residents and fellows in Argentina.

PURPOSE

Moral courage is the conviction to take action on one's ethical beliefs despite the risk of adverse consequences.. It aimed to evaluate the correlation between social desirability score and moral courage scores of medical residents and fellows, and to explore gender and specialty-based differences of moral courage scores.

METHODS

In April 2018, the Moral Courage Scale for Physicians (MCSP), the Professional Moral Courage (PMC) scale and the Marlowe-Crowne scale to measure social desirability were administered to 87 medical residents from Hospital Alemán of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

RESULTS

Cronbach's alpha coefficients were 0.78, 0.74 and 0.81 for the Marlowe-Crowne, MCSP and PMC scales, respectively. Correlation analysis showed that moral courage scores were poorly correlated with social desirability scores, while both moral courage scales were highly correlated with each other. Physicians who were training in a surgical specialty showed lower moral courage scores than nonsurgical specialty trainees, and male from any specialty tended to have lower moral courage scores than females. Particularly, individuals performing a surgical specialty ranked lower when assessing "multiple values", "endurance of threats", and "going beyond compliance" dimensions from PMC scale. Male individuals tended to rank lower than females on "multiple values", "moral goals" and "endurance of threats" dimensions.

CONCLUSION

There was a poor correlation between two validated moral courage scores and social desirability score of the medical residents and fellows in Argentina. Conversely, both moral courage tools showed a good correlation and concordance between them, making these scales reasonably interchangeable.