Chiropractic Students' Perceptions about Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Objective: To assess the attitudes of chiropractic students toward interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as to compare the attitudes of students at chiropractic-only colleges to those in chiropractic institutions training multiple health professions. Methods: This was a cross-sectional survey conducted in 4 chiropractic institutions. Two are universities offering training in chiropractic and other CAM health professions, and two are chiropractic colleges offering only chiropractic training. Students were approximately midway in their course of training. The study instrument was the Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale (IEPS), an 18-item questionnaire comprising 4 factors, with a 6-point Likert response scale. Mean total scores for each group of students were compared using an analysis of variance (ANOVA), with a post-hoc Bonferroni test of multiple comparisons. The mean total score of the two chiropractic-only colleges was compared to the mean total score of the two multiple health professions colleges using a t-test for independent samples. Results: The survey was conducted in 2011 with 248 students. The mean total scores did not differ significantly among the 4 colleges (p = 0.57), nor did they when comparing the 2 chiropractic-only colleges to the 2 multiple health professions colleges (p = 0.47). Conclusion: Based on the non-significant differences between the scores at the 4 institutions we surveyed, as well as their overall similarity to the students’ scores in the 2000 study, we feel it is appropriate to aggregate all DC students’ scores in our planned study involving samples from a number of health professions students.