چکیده (انگلیسی):

Background:Tolerance of ambiguity, or the extent to which ambiguous situations are perceived as desirable, is an
important component of the attitudes and behaviors of medical students. However, few studies have compared
this trait across the years of medical school. General practitioners are considered to have a higher ambiguity
tolerance than specialists. We compared ambiguity tolerance between general practitioners and medical students.
Methods:We designed a cross-sectional study to evaluate the ambiguity tolerance of 622 medical students in the
first to sixth academic years. We compared this with the ambiguity tolerance of 30 general practitioners. We used
the inventory for measuring ambiguity tolerance (IMA) developed by Reis (1997), which includes three measures of
ambiguity tolerance: openness to new experiences, social conflicts, and perception of insoluble problems.
Results:We obtained a total of 564 complete data sets (return rate 90.1%) from medical students and 29
questionnaires (return rate 96.7%) from general practitioners. In relation to the reference groups defined by Reis
(1997), medical students had poor ambiguity tolerance on all three scales. No differences were found between
those in the first and the sixth academic years, although we did observe gender-specific differences in ambiguity
tolerance. We found no differences in ambiguity tolerance between general practitioners and medical students.
Conclusions:The ambiguity tolerance of the students that we assessed was below average, and appeared to be
stable throughout the course of their studies. In contrast to our expectations, the general practitioners did not have
a higher level of ambiguity tolerance than the students did.