Characteristics of role models who influenced medical residents to choose surgery as a specialty: exploratory study.

Context And Objective: Choosing a medical specialty and making decisions concerning a career are difficult processes for medical students and newly graduated physicians.This exploratory study aimed to investigate the influence of role models on the choice of surgery as a career, and to determine the most influential model characteristics.

Design And Setting: Qualitative analysis on responses to a self-administered questionnaire, in different teaching-learning settings.