Authors' response to 'letter to the Editor: Left to their own devices: Medical learners' use of mobile technologies'

摘要

We thank you for bringing the letter regarding our paper "Left to their own devices: medical learners' use of mobile technologies" to our attention. The authors of the letter present a critique of the way that we reported our findings, largely based on the statistical aspects of this mixed-methods study and the conclusions we drew from them. However, we would argue that the letter does not add to the issues we raised in our paper, to mixed methods approaches, or to the debate on mobile devices in medical education as a whole. The authors of this letter have correctly identified an error in our use of a t-test on the non-parametric survey data we included in the study. We have run the analyses again using Mann-Whitney U, which identified minor variances in which items were identified as significant. These would have disappeared if we had slightly the arbitrary threshold for significance. We should note that we did not use the tests of significance in our analyses and we only briefly mentioned them in our discussion of the results. This was a mixed methods study that sought to capture a gestalt about how learners across a whole medical program used their school-issued mobile devices, not one that sought to prove or disprove specific experimental hypotheses.