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February 20, 2023
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High grit scores associated with scholarly productivity in orthopedic residents

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DALLAS — Presented results showed high grit scores were associated with mental toughness, scholarly productivity and academic involvement in orthopedic surgery residents.

“Grit is a trait-level perseverance, hardiness and mental toughness. It’s associated with multiple nonacademic performance metrics. These include the likelihood of completing school in 4 vs. 5 years, clinical performance, residency match rates and decreased burnout rates,” Griffith G. Gosnell, MS, said in his presentation at the Orthopaedic Research Society Annual Meeting. “There are few ways to measure nonacademic performance metrics, [such as] mental toughness, the ability to commit lots of research [and] the ability to work while you're tired. Grit serves to fill that void,” he added.

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High grit scores were associated with mental toughness, scholarly productivity and academic involvement in orthopedic surgery residents. Image: Adobe Stock

Gosnell and colleagues performed an online, cross-sectional survey, which was distributed to 4,832 American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgery resident members in the U.S. and Canada. Along with demographic information, respondents disclosed their respective number of peer-reviewed publications, number of conference presentations, number of lead author publications, number of published book chapters and number of manuscripts.

Griffith G. Gosnell
Griffith G. Gosnell

Respondents also completed the 12-question short-grit questionnaire, which measured grit on a scale of 1 (not at all gritty) to 5 (extremely gritty), according to Gosnell. A high grit score was categorized by a score of 4 or more, while a low grit score was categorized by a score of 3.9 or less.

Overall, 8.3% of surveyed residents (n = 399) completed the questionnaire. Mean grit score was 3.8, with a range of 1.75 to 5. Gosnell and colleagues found compared with residents in the low grit cohort, residents in the high grit cohort were more likely to have at least 10 peer-reviewed publications (7% vs. 20%, respectively), at least 10 conference presentations (12% vs. 27%, respectively) and at least seven publications as the first or lead author (8% vs. 24%, respectively).

“[Grit] does not relate to cognitive performance metrics, namely GPA and exam scores, but it does relate to noncognitive metrics, such as clinical performance, moral reasoning, mental toughness, and as we showed, academic productivity,” Gosnell said. “A use of grit in the future could possibly be for applicant evaluation,” he concluded.