Physicians by passion, by chance or by profession? A research on medical doctors in Italy, paper presentato al XVI Congresso mondiale dell’International Sociological Association, RC52

Three were the main questions of this research. First, how many ways of being a physician are there in Italy and can they be generalized as to make a typology of physicians? Second, do physicians believe that they have a common identity? Third, can the elite segment of physicians be analyzed as a Weberian status group? In this conference I will emphasize the first and the third question and I will skip the second. The research involved two surveys (taken in 2004): the first on 1.162 general practitioners and the second on 900 physicians of every kind. Both samples were stratified by sex, age and region (and the second by specialty). In this presentation I will be presenting just the results of the first survey. Three ideal-types of medical doctors stood out: the physicians by passion, by chance and by profession. According to a third of physicians, they have a basic identity in common, for another 23% they don’t and for a larger 40% they partly do and partly don’t. Among the less convinced, the physicians in the South and the ones that work in hospitals. As to the third question, self recruitment rate is about 10% and is higher among the youngest and the oldest, while a 32% comes from the upper class. Moving from social origins to conscious choices, the sense of self-conscious identity and the boundaries to outsiders (with regard to occupation of spouses and to social frequentations) become stronger. The majority of physicians have expressed a center left orientation (this question was asked only in the second survey).