Assignment

(1) Report the descriptive characteristics of your sample in a single table (e.g. breakdown by gender, age range, and other factors that describe the sample). An example of a table is given below.

(2) What is the correlation between age of the physician and litigation fear scale. Write up two or three sentences to report and explain this finding.

Now go back to the SPSS data file and split the file by gender of the physician separately and run the same correlation.

Data --- Split File --- Compare Groups --- Groups based on: --- gender3 --- OK

(3) Is there a difference in the correlations when men and women analyzed separately? In other words is there a gender difference in fear of litigation? (Hint: There is! When the data is split by gender, it appears that the correlation is significant for one gender and not for the other) Report this finding.

Repeat for practice location. Go back and split the file by practice location instead of gender and run the same correlation.
Data --- Split File --- Compare Groups --- Groups based on: --- pracloc9 --- OK

(4) Do rural, urban/private, medical school practice physicians have the same fear of litigation? Report this finding.

• When you are done you can reset the file to analyze the whole group. Go back to the Split file screen. Check Analyze all cases, do not create groups and then hit Reset, then OK.

(5) Check and report on the correlation between age of the physician and risk management beliefs scale. Is there a relationship between getting older and physicians' feelings/beliefs that they are better able to manage risk?

(6) Check and report on the correlation between the number of patients per month and litigation fear scale. Why would this make sense?

(7) Run frequencies on the variables insur10, sued11, insur16, board22, likely12, riskmg13, diffmg14, protec15, (include them in one frequency analysis rather than doing them one by one). Now, look at the output.

(a) Summarize this information in 2 separate graphs: One graph that has the Yes/No questions: and one that has the Likert Scale questions. Create the graphs in Microsoft Office. See the two examples in the attached file (The numbers are not correct. You have to run the frequencies yourself).

(b) Then write a few statements summarizing the main issues that the data and the charts reveal. For example:

In this sample, 46% of the physicians surveyed have had a previous lawsuit. Very few physicians surveyed (less than 10%) have less than one million dollars-worth of litigation coverage....

Figure 1: Physician malpractice data

Figure 2: Physicians beliefs about litigation exposure and risk management

(8) What is medical malpractice and what impact does litigation against physicians (or medical malpractice lawsuits) have on the healthcare industry in the USA? Use at least three references to help support your answer. (350 words) Use APA format.

• Students must answer each of the two parts of the question and use references to support their points.