Health Professions Education Unit, Hull York Medical School, York, UK.
Google Inc, Mountain View, CA, USA.
Med Educ. 2021 Jul;55(7):818-824. doi: 10.1111/medu.14463. Epub 2021 Feb 22.
In everyday life, feelings are important to us, influencing our decision-making and motivating our actions. This is equally true within medicine and medical education, where feelings influence key aspects such as clinical decision-making, empathy, resilience, professional identity, reflection, team dynamics, career choices and questions of prejudice and bias. Feelings are therefore legitimate targets in medical education research, but asking research participants to talk openly about feelings can be challenging for participants and researchers alike. Within the disciple of User Experience (UX)-a relatively new research discipline used in the world of technology-researchers also seek to understand their customer's feelings, which are central to aspects of brand loyalty and choice of software platforms. UX researchers have developed innovative ways to explore feelings, in particular through the use of Love and Breakup Methodology (LBM)-participants are asked to write love and breakup letters to the product or app under study, and the letters are then used to guide the focus group discussion that follows. Methods: In this article, we describe the theoretical underpinnings of LBM, including ontological considerations. We also consider how LBM can be successfully used in medical education research and outline how we have adapted it in our own research studies and programme evaluations. Conclusions: Love and breakup letters are creative ways of understanding participants' positive and negative emotions about the matter under study. LBM has been utilised extensively by UX researchers in technology, but has been little used in medical education. It has rich potential to enhance research approaches to aspects of medicine that are influenced by feelings, including empathy and resilience, team working and many other aspects of professional practice. Although principally a focus group research tool, it can be adapted to other approaches, including questionnaire surveys and individual interviews.
在日常生活中，情感对我们很重要，影响我们的决策并激发我们的行动。这在医学和医学教育中同样适用，情感影响着临床决策、同理心、适应力、职业认同、反思、团队动态、职业选择以及偏见和歧视等关键方面。因此，情感是医学教育研究中的合理目标，但让研究参与者公开谈论情感对参与者和研究人员来说都是一个挑战。在用户体验（UX）学科内——这是一个在技术领域中相对较新的研究学科——研究人员也试图了解他们客户的感受，这些感受是品牌忠诚度和软件平台选择的核心。UX 研究人员已经开发出创新的方法来探索情感，特别是通过使用爱与分手方法论（LBM）——要求参与者给正在研究的产品或应用程序写情书和分手信，然后用这些信件来指导接下来的焦点小组讨论。方法：本文描述了 LBM 的理论基础，包括本体论的考虑。我们还考虑了如何在医学教育研究中成功地使用 LBM，并概述了我们如何在自己的研究和课程评估中对其进行了改编。结论：爱与分手信是了解参与者对研究课题的积极和消极情绪的创造性方式。LBM 在技术领域的 UX 研究人员中得到了广泛应用，但在医学教育中应用较少。它在增强医学中受情感影响的方面的研究方法方面具有丰富的潜力，包括同理心和适应力、团队合作以及许多其他专业实践方面。尽管 LBM 主要是一种焦点小组研究工具，但它可以适应其他方法，包括问卷调查和个人访谈。
