Objective: To determine the perceptions of emergency medicine (EM) academic faculty leaders and other academic emergency physicians regarding importance and knowledge of specific research methodology content areas and training priorities.
Methods: The authors conducted a confidential mail survey of 52 EM academic chairs, 112 residency directors, 116 research directors, and 400 randomly selected other members of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM). Respondents rated the importance of knowledge about each of 12 content areas for enhancing research productivity, rated their own knowledge of these areas, and identified training priorities. Standard descriptive statistics were used to characterize the study population; subgroup differences were examined by nonparametric statistics.
Results: 551 (81%) of those sampled returned surveys. Most (90%) respondents thought that knowledge about all selected content areas was important for enhancing research productivity; however, 7-37% (depending on the topic) reported little knowledge or experience in specific areas. Research directors reported highest overall knowledge levels (p < 0.001), followed by chairs, residency directors, and other SAEM members. Top training priorities (identified by all subgroups) included study planning (70%), problem identification/hypothesis construction (41%), and proposal writing (38%).
Conclusions: These data support the continued need to offer broad training in research methodology, but suggest that greater emphasis be given to concepts involved in initiating and planning a study and to strengthening research proposal writing skills. These results should be of interest to academic departments who must address their own training needs, and help support the development of research methodology curricula on regional and national levels to advance the state of research in the specialty of EM.