The Situational Analysis of Teaching-Learning in Clinical Education: Methodological Development in Medical Education Research

Background Clinical teaching-learning is a context-bound phenomenon. One of the problems related to research in clinical education is the lack of sufficient attention to coherent and context-appropriate methodologies. The clinical learning environment is inherently an integration of teaching and clinical care, which has made the nature of clinical education complicated and multifaceted. Improving and developing clinical teaching-learning requires not only an explanation of the current situation, but also the development of new research methods is necessary to reconstruct the teaching-learning system and, as a result, clinical education reinforcements. Methods in this study, the authors used the situational analysis approach as a postmodern version of grounded theory. Situational analysis is an approach for identifying and describing social worlds and action arenas by using maps to represent complexity. The data of this study were collected focusing on triangulation. Thirty-one participants were involved in the web-based qualitative survey, while seven participants took part in the semi-structured phone interview. Results the teaching-learning situation in clinical education on general medicine in Iran was represented in three maps; situational, social worlds/arenas, and positional. In addition, the results showed, clinical education of general medicine in Iran in 6 positions has serious problems and challenges. As a result, recommendations were provided to develop and support effective clinical teaching. Conclusions The findings of this research revealed key messages that can be explained using Foucault's discourse. In addition, from the methodological point of view, the present study encourages the use of the situational analysis approach to study complex systems and in order to educational excellence and improvement calls for further methodological development in medical education research.