Beyond Observation: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of Role Modeling Experiences Among Clinical Residents in an Ethiopian Teaching Hospital: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Background and Aims: Role modeling is universally regarded as essential to professional identity formation in medical education, yet its experiential and embodied complexity remains underexamined, particularly outside well-resourced Western settings. This study investigated how clinical residents in an Ethiopian teaching hospital experience role modeling relationships, and how cultural hierarchy, resource scarcity, and postcolonial institutional structures shape that experience. Methods: We conducted a hermeneutic phenomenological study combining van Manen's life world existential with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Ten purposively sampled residents from five departments at Addis Ababa University completed two rounds of in-depth interviews three to 4 months apart, 3 months of structured reflective journaling, and were the subject of 20 h of clinical observation by the first author, supplemented by analysis of institutional and personal artifacts, over a 9 month period (September 2024-May 2025). Results: Role modeling was experienced as an embodied and relational phenomenon organized around four interconnected themes: (1) embodied transmission of clinical knowledge through haptic, kinesthetic, affective, and intercorporeal engagement; (2) temporal disruption of professional becoming through existential hinge points and biographical rupture; (3) dialectical navigation of admiration, resistance, and hierarchical power; and (4) moral formation through witnessing mentors navigate resource constraints, including formation through negative as well as positive modeling. Conclusion: Role modeling in this Ethiopian residency setting is better understood as a chiasmic, reciprocal intertwining of mentor and resident than as one-directional transmission. Residents actively interpreted, resisted, and selectively appropriated modeled practices, doing so within a postcolonial institutional context of scarcity and hierarchy that gave this process locally specific form. These findings suggest faculty development, curricula, and institutional policy in comparable resource-limited settings should explicitly address the embodied and power-mediated dimensions of modeling.