Medical curricula and students' attitudes towards general and family practice in Mexico.

In an exploratory study of the influence of different undergraduate curricula on students' attitudes towards general and family medicine, a questionnaire including a Likert attitude scale was administered to a sample of 1217 first- and fourth-year students at five medical schools with different curricula in Mexico City. The preliminary results suggest that the innovative educational programmes have not apparently had a significant impact on students' attitudes. It is hypothesized that students' perceptions of the job market are stronger in determining their attitudes than the orientation of the curriculum itself. It is also suggested that the differences found among the students of the five schools might have been due to differences in the populations entering them. The instrument developed during the study proved to be sufficiently reliable to warrant further use.