Browsing by Author "Silver, Elisabeth R."

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    Impact of COVID-19 on residency choice: A survey of New York City medical students
    (Public Library of Science, 2021) Lee, Kate E.; Lim, Francesca; Silver, Elisabeth R.; Faye, Adam S.; Hur, Chin
    Objectives: The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic disrupted medical student education, particularly in New York City (NYC). We aimed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical students’ residency choices. Methods: The authors conducted a cross-sectional survey of medical students in all years of study at four NYC medical schools (Columbia, Cornell, NYU, and SUNY Downstate). The survey was fielded from 19 Aug 2020 to 21 Sep 2020. Survey questions included items assessing COVID-19 impact on residency choices, personal impact of COVID-19, residency/specialty choices, and factors influencing these choices. Results: A total of 2310 students received the survey, with 547 (23.7%) providing partial responses and 212 (9.2%) providing valid responses for our primary analysis. 59.0% of participants thought that COVID-19 influenced their choice of residency/specialty, with 0.9% saying the influence was to a great extent, 22.2% to some extent, and 35.8% very little. On multivariable analysis, factors that were independently associated with COVID-19 impacting residency choice included low debt ($1 to $99,999: adjOR 2.23, 95%CI 1.02–5.03) compared with no debt and Other race/ethnicity (adjOR 0.26, 95%CI 0.10–0.63) compared with White race/ethnicity. On secondary analysis of all participants answering survey items for logistic regression regardless of survey completion, direct personal impact of COVID-19 was significantly associated with COVID-19 impacting specialty choice (adjOR 1.90, 95%CI 1.04–3.52). Moreover, 24 students (11.6%) reported a change in their top residency choice from before to during/after COVID-19, citing concerns about frontline work, work-life balance, and risk of harm. Conclusions: Our study found that 3 in 5 (59.0%) participants felt that COVID-19 impacted their residency choice, with 11.6% of respondents explicitly changing their top specialty choice. Investigating the impact of the pandemic on medical student residency considerations is crucial to understand how medical career outlooks may change in the future.
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    Problems of the Past? Temporal Distance from the Civil Rights Movement Undermines Majority Group Support for Workplace Diversity Policies
    (2025-04-01) Silver, Elisabeth R.; Hebl, Michelle
    Resistance to policies aimed at reducing racial inequities in employment, particularly among demographic majority group members, represents a significant barrier to addressing racism in the workplace. Americans are divided on how much progress has been made toward racial equity since the Civil Rights Era and what should be done to further it. These divides often fall along racial lines, such that White Americans overestimate the amount of racial progress achieved in recent decades, relative to both reality and the perceptions of Black Americans. The current work investigates how beliefs that racial inequities in employment are primarily a problem of the distant, rather than more recent, past undermine majority group members’ support for workplace DEI policies. Bridging insights from construal-level theory and social identity theory, White Americans may be especially likely to distance themselves from past moments of racial reckoning—specifically, the Civil Rights Movement—because these events highlight intergroup transgressions committed by in-group members. Results from two studies (an online survey and an experiment) suggest that White Americans subjectively perceive the Civil Rights Movement as farther in the past than Black Americans. Further, among White respondents, greater temporal distance from the Civil Rights Movement indirectly affects support for diversity policies by facilitating overly optimistic perceptions of how much racial progress has been achieved since the Civil Rights Movement. The findings advance research on the cognitive underpinnings of majority group members’ attitudes toward diversity policies by highlighting the critical role of subjective temporality in racial attitudes. Together, these studies offer a novel lens for understanding majority group resistance to organizational diversity policy.