Interactions between the sex of the clinician grader and the sex of the chiropractic student intern on spinal manipulation assessment grade.

Objective: The purpose of this project was to determine if there was any relationship between the sex of the clinician grader and the sex of the chiropractic student intern on student spinal manipulation assessment grades.

Methods: Twelve thousand six hundred and thirty-one supervised patient adjustments by student interns were analyzed over a 3-year data collection window. Student interns were assessed by multiple male and female clinicians in a teaching clinic using a modified Dreyfus model scoring system on a 1-4 scale (1 = novice, 4 = proficient). A Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare the relationship between grader sex and student grade as well as student sex and student grade.

Results: Sex of the grader had a statistically significant effect on spinal manipulation assessment grade, p < .001, with male clinician graders assigning average scores of 2.81 ± 0.39 (mean ± SD) and female clinician graders scores of 3.01 ± 0.52, r = .18. Sex of the student had a statistically significant but negligible (r = .08) effect on spinal manipulation assessment grade, p < .001, with male students averaging slightly higher scores (2.93 ± 0.47) than females (2.86 ± 0.44) on the modified Dreyfus scale.

Conclusion: Male clinicians tended to assign lower grades on spinal manipulation assessments than female clinicians. Male students on average received slightly higher scores than female students on spinal manipulation assessments.