Short White Coats: Knowledge, Identity and Status Negotiations of First-year Medical Students

• In Event: 3176 - Sociology of Medical Education

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the importance of the medical student’s short white coat has been reinforced in the United States by the White Coat Ceremony, a ritual created to emphasize the student’s membership in the profession and the responsibilities this entails. In presenting students with their coats, medical educators emphasize the public values of the medical profession, particularly medical humanism. The students, however, experience the white coat primarily as a measure of their medical knowledge. In this paper I discuss the meanings medical students invest in their white coats and how this shapes their strategic deployment of the coat as a status signal. This work is based on findings from a four-year ethnography of medical education, focusing primarily on interviews with 10% of the cohort about the White Coat Ceremony, their ethnomethods of coat wearing, and explorations of the meanings they associated with their coats. I pay particular attention to instances of teasing and other spoken and unspoken rules of conduct for the white coat, showing how these rules are less about professional dress itself than about students’ accountability to medical knowledge as an aspect of membership in the profession. How students relate to a prominent symbol of the profession can help illuminate what they know about the profession and how they regard themselves as professionals. Learning more about this can help scholars understand the subtle changes in identity and subjectivity that accompany professional socialization.

Author

• Alexandra Vinson, University of Michigan