Assessing Moral Judgements in Veterinary Students: An Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study from Germany

SIMPLE SUMMARY: On the one hand, veterinary ethics is a required part of veterinary education. On the other hand, the success of ethics teaching and the students’ skills concerning judgements in morally demanding situations are hardly evaluated systematically. This article presents an innovative tool to evaluate those skills in veterinary students in a first case of application. One group of students in this case had taken ethics classes, the other had not. The participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire with different scenarios from veterinary practice and answer additional free-text questions. Students who had taken ethics classes did not answer generally different from those students who had not taken ethics classes. However, there were many overall differences between the students’ answers, decisions, attitudes, and explanations. The tool is therefore suggested for further evaluations of ethics teaching and moral judgement skills in veterinary students. ABSTRACT: Although veterinary ethics is required in veterinary curricula and part of the competencies expected of a trained veterinary surgeon according to the European Association of Establishments for Veterinary Education (EAEVE), knowledge concerning the effects of ethics teaching and tools evaluating moral judgement are scarce. To address this lack of tools with a mixed-methods approach, a questionnaire with three case scenarios presenting typical ethical conflicts of veterinary practice was administered to two groups of veterinary students (one had taken ethics classes, one did not). The questionnaire contained both open-ended and closed questions and was analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative part aimed at revealing different argumentation patterns between the two groups, whereas the quantitative part focused on the students’ approval of different roles and attitudes possibly relating to veterinarians. The results showed no major differences between both groups. However, answering patterns suggest a clear diversity among the students in their perception of morally relevant factors and the veterinary profession. Awareness of morally challenging elements of their profession was presented by students of both groups. With this exploratory study, the application of an innovative mixed-methods tool for evaluating the moral judgement of veterinary medical students is demonstrated.