Defining Potentially Unprofessional Behavior on Social Media for Health Care Professionals: Mixed Methods Study

• Published in: JMIR medical education 2022-08, Vol.8 (3), p.e35585-e35585
• Main Authors: Vukušić Rukavina, Tea, Machala Poplašen, Lovela, Majer, Marjeta, Relić, Danko, Viskić, Joško, Marelić, Marko
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bias; Clinical competence; Ethics; Gender; Health care; Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act 1996-US; Medical profession; Mixed methods research; Multimedia; Profanity; Professionals; Social networks; Social research; Students; Vascular surgery
• ISSN: 2369-3762; 2369-3762
• DOI: 10.2196/35585

Social media presence among health care professionals is ubiquitous and largely beneficial for their personal and professional lives. New standards are forming in the context of e-professionalism, which are loosening the predefined older and offline terms. With these benefits also come dangers, with exposure to evaluation on all levels from peers, superiors, and the public, as witnessed in the #medbikini movement. The objectives of this study were to develop an improved coding scheme (SMePROF coding scheme) for the assessment of unprofessional behavior on Facebook of medical or dental students and faculty, compare reliability between coding schemes used in previous research and SMePROF coding scheme, compare gender-based differences for the assessment of the professional content on Facebook, validate the SMePROF coding scheme, and assess the level of and to characterize web-based professionalism on publicly available Facebook profiles of medical or dental students and faculty. A search was performed via a new Facebook account using a systematic probabilistic sample of students and faculty in the University of Zagreb School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. Each profile was subsequently assessed with regard to professionalism based on previously published criteria and compared using the SMePROF coding scheme developed for this study. Intercoder reliability increased when the SMePROF coding scheme was used for the comparison of gender-based coding results. Results showed an increase in the gender-based agreement of the final codes for the category professionalism, from 85% in the first phase to 96.2% in the second phase. Final results of the second phase showed that there was almost no difference between female and male coders for coding potentially unprofessional content for students (7/240, 2.9% vs 5/203, 2.5%) or for coding unprofessional content for students (11/240, 4.6% vs 11/203, 5.4%). Comparison of definitive results between the first and second phases indicated an understanding of web-based professionalism, with unprofessional content being very low, both for students (9/222, 4.1% vs 12/206, 5.8%) and faculty (1/25, 4% vs 0/23, 0%). For assessment of the potentially unprofessional content, we observed a 4-fold decrease, using the SMePROF rubric, for students (26/222, 11.7% to 6/206, 2.9%) and a 5-fold decrease for faculty (6/25, 24% to 1/23, 4%). SMePROF coding scheme for assessing professionalism of health-care professionals on Facebook i