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This study investigated the factors that influenced the career decisions of young physicians and the characteristics of their practices. The collection has five datasets: Public-Use Version of the Young Physicians Survey (Dataset 1), Socioeconomic Monitoring System Study (Dataset 2), ZIP Code Data (Dataset 3), Verbatim Responses to the Open-Ended Questions (Dataset 4), and Restricted-Use Version of the Young Physicians Survey (Dataset 5).

The Public-Use Version of the Young Physicians Survey comprises responses from the Young Physicians Survey (YPS), plus merged data from the American Medical Association (AMA) Masterfile and the Association of American Medical Colleges' Student and Applicant Information Management System (SAIMS) database. The YPS interviewed physicians below 40 years of age who recently completed graduate medical training and were in their early years of practice. These physicians were queried about their graduate medical training, perceptions of the medical profession, current practice arrangements, career decisions, family background, patient care activities, and current income and expenses. To obtain information on current practice arrangements, respondents were questioned about the practices they worked in, including who owned the practices, the number of physicians in each practice, specialties or subspecialties practiced, usual fees for selected services, percentages of revenues from HMOs, PPOs, and IPAs, and percentages of patients who were Medicare patients, had no health insurance coverage, or were poor, Black, Hispanic, severely physically disabled, or chronically mentally ill. Questions on career decisions asked respondents about factors that influenced their career choices, such as reasons for working in multiple practices, reasons for leaving past practices, and reasons for deciding in favor of or against self-employment. Information on family background elicited by the survey includes the respondent's race, marital status, and educational debt, parents' income class and education, number of children living in the respondent's home, and whether the respondent's spouse or parents were physicians. Questions on patient care activities included questions on the number of hours spent providing uncompensated health care to the poor, and the number of hours spent with patients in a variety of settings, such as the office, emergency rooms, hospital outpatient clinics, and operating rooms. Information from the AMA Masterfile and the SAIMS database includes board certification status, AMA membership, school and year of graduation, Medical College Admission Test scores, primary undergraduate institution, most recent grade point averages, place of birth, number of acceptances to United States medical schools, parents' occupations, preferred medical specialty, and preferred practice setting.

Dataset 2 comprises responses from the AMA's Socioeconomic Monitoring System (SMS), a semiannual survey of nonfederal physicians that collected data on topics similar to those in the YPS, such as practice ownership, hours spent seeing patients in various settings, income, expenses, and opinions on practice procedures. The SMS data can be used for comparative analyses of young, prime, and senior physicians.

The ZIP Code Data contain estimates for the composition of the population residing in the ZIP code areas of the YPS respondents' main practices. This includes estimates of the size of each ZIP code area population, as well as its components with respect to gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, and income. Also included are estimates of the number of physicians and their composition with respect to age, sex, practice type, and specialty.

Dataset 4 contains verbatim responses to open-ended questions asked in the YPS.

The Restricted-Use Version of the Young Physicians Survey is the same as the Public-Use Version of the Young Physicians Survey, except for some variables that were restricted from general dissemination for reasons of confidentiality. The restricted-use version includes the restricted variables, but the public-use version does not.

The purpose of this survey was to obtain information on the characteristics and practice patterns of early career physicians in order to analyze trends in physicians' activities and the supply of physicians. To that end, the survey interviewed early career physicians and re-interviewed physicians who participated in the previous survey of early career physicians PRACTICE PATTERNS OF YOUNG PHYSICIANS, 1987 (ICPSR 9277). With separate samples drawn for allopathic and osteopathic physicians, the respondents were interviewed about their medical training, medical education financing, career choices and satisfaction, practice arrangements and compensation, and patient care activities. They were also questioned about medical care management in their practice(s), perceptions of their freedom to deliver care, medical malpractice claims, and the composition of their patients, such as the percent who were poor, black, Hispanic, uninsured, covered by Medicaid or Medicare, or had severe physical disabilities, chronic mental illness, or problems with substance abuse. Demographic characteristics covered by the survey include race, Hispanic origin, year of birth, marital status, number and ages of children, and parents' education.

In addition to the variables collected by survey, the allopath sample data also comprise variables obtained from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Student and Applicant Information Management System (SAIMS) of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The AMA variables include gender, name of medical school, board certification status, physician's specialty, and AMA membership, while the SAIMS variables include dates of application to medical school, graduation dates, Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores, undergraduate grade-point averages, religious preference, career preference, preferred practice setting, educational debt, scholarship information, and participation in courses/clerkships in different subject areas.

The study comprises five data files. Dataset 1 contains the public-use version of the data for the allopath sample and Dataset 2 the public-use version of the data data for the osteopath sample. Both of these files were generated by ICPSR from the original restricted-use allopath and osteopath data files provided by the principal investigator, which are stored as Datasets 3 and 4 respectively. As noted in the ICPSR Processing Note in the codebook, Dataset 5 contains 26 restricted variables which the principal investigator omitted from the original allopath data (Dataset 3) for reasons of confidentiality. ICPSR received the omitted variables in 2009, 14 years after its initial release of the data.