Do Moral Judgments in Moral Dilemmas Make One More Inclined to Choose a Medical Degree?

The role of moral intuitions and moral judgments has become increasingly prominent in educational and academic choices. The present research aims to examine if the moral judgments elicited in sacrificial trolley dilemmas have a distinct pattern for the decisions made by junior medical students, in comparison to those of senior high school students. We work with this sample because it represents the population out of which medical students are recruited in the case of Bucharest, Romania. Our findings show that moral judgments are indeed a significant predictor for a respondent's status as medical students. This result, albeit with limitations, bears multiple practical implications, from developing empirically informed medical ethics courses in medical schools to evidence-based policy designs which consider factors such as morality alongside financial outcomes and incentives.

Testing the Youth Physical Activity Promotion Model during the COVID-19 Pandemic, with Partial Least Squares Second-Order Latent Constructs.

We tested the Youth Physical Activity Promotion (YPAP) framework on Romanian students in order to identify actionable determinants to support participation in physical activity. Our sample consisted of 665 responses to an online survey, with participants aged 18-23 (mean = 19 years); 70% were women. We used the partial least squares algorithm to estimate the relationships between students' behavior and possible predictors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that all the theoretical dimensions of YPAP (predisposing, enabling and reinforcing) have a positive and significant impact on physical activity, with two mediating mechanisms expressed as predisposing factors: able and worth. Unlike previous research, we used second-order latent constructs, unveiling a particular structure for the enabling dimension that only includes sport competence, fitness and skills, but not the environmental factors.

Determinants of Satisfaction with Services, and Trust in the Information Received in Community Pharmacies: A Comparative Analysis to Foster Pharmaceutical Care Adoption.

Patient's satisfaction with community pharmacy services, and patients' trust in the information received in community pharmacies are important drivers of pharmaceutical care adoption. An online questionnaire assessing patient satisfaction with the services received in pharmacies and trust in the pharmacist's advice, along with their determinants, was administered to 343 Romanian chronic and non-chronic patients. Using various statistical tests, exploratory factor analysis, and robust regression we explored determinants of satisfaction and trust. We found that satisfaction with services is predicted by pharmacists' attitude (ß = 631, p < 0.001), low waiting time (ß = 0.180, p < 0.001), affordable cost of the drugs (ß = 0.09, p = 0.009), and drug availability (ß = 0.157, p < 0.001). At the same time, trust in the information received is driven by pharmacists' attention (ß = 0.610, p < 0.001), whether the patient received precautionary information (ß = 0.425, p < 0.001), low waiting time (ß = 0.287, p < 0.001), and whether the respondent is a chronic patient or not (non-chronic patients express more trust, ß = 0.328, p = 0.04). Our study expands the existing paradigm that sees trust as a simple predictor of satisfaction by showing that trust and satisfaction are predicted by different variables, and thus they should be addressed using different strategies. In fact, we found that they share only one predictor-waiting time, highly significant in both cases. Our findings show that, without prioritizing trust in the information received in community pharmacies to reduce information asymmetry between patient and pharmacist, the focus only on patient satisfaction may lead to a scenario in which community pharmacies will end up to be better integrated in the business sector and not in the public health system.

Information or Habit: What Health Policy Makers Should Know about the Drivers of Self-Medication among Romanians.

We use the Knowledge, Perceptions and Practices framework to analyze determinants of three types of self-medication practices in Romania: (1) self-medication in the case of cold/flu/viral infections; (2) taking non-prescribed medicine in general; and (3) self-medication based on recommendations by others. We analyzed 706 responses to an online survey and used a factor-based Partial Least Squares algorithm (PLSF) to estimate the relationships between each type of self-medication and possible predictors. Our results show that self-medication is strongly predicted by non-cognitive behavioral factors such as habits and similarity of symptoms, while cognitive determinants such as knowledge and understanding of potential risks are not significantly associated with self-medication behaviors. This paper identifies nonlinear relationships among self-medication practices and its predictors and discusses how our results can help policymakers calibrate interventions with better accuracy.