Cliques within the crowd: identifying medical conference attendee subgroups by their motivations for participation

Abstract

Conferences enable rapid information sharing and networking that are vital to career development within academic communities. Addressing diverse attendee needs is challenging and getting it wrong wastes resources and dampens enthusiasm for the field. This study explores whether, and how, motivations for attendance can be grouped in relation to preferences to offer guidance to organizers and attendees. A pragmatic constructivist case study approach using mixed methods was adopted. Semi-structured interviews completed with key informants underwent thematic analysis. Survey results outlining attendees’ perspectives underwent cluster and factor analysis. Stakeholder interviews (n = 13) suggested attendees could be grouped by motivations predictable from level of specialisation in a field and past engagement with conferences. From n = 1229 returned questionnaires, motivations were clustered into three factors: learning, personal and social. Three groups of attendees were identified. Group 1 (n = 500; 40.7%) was motivated by all factors. Group 2 (n = 345; 28.1%) was mainly motivated by the learning factor. Group 3 (n = 188; 15.3%) scored the social factor highest for in-person conferences and the learning factor highest for virtual meetings. All three groups expressed a preference for hybrid conferences in the future. This study indicates that medical conference attendees can be clustered based on their learning, personal and social motivations for attendance. The taxonomy enables organizers to tailor conference formats with guidance on how to utilize hybrid conferences, thereby enabling better catering to attendees’ desires for knowledge gain relative to networking.

COVID-19 pandemisinin ulusal göz hastalıkları toplantılarındaki bildiri katılımı üzerine etkileri

“…First of all, it was difficult or impossible to attend face-to-face meetings due to travel restrictions and social distance measures during the pandemic. Online meetings, on the other hand, eliminated the need for transfer, accommodation and related expenses and provided a more flexible schedule [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][16][17][18][19][20]. These factors encouraged more people to attend the online meetings.…”

“…Furthermore, online meetings provide an international platform by enabling scientists and experts from different countries to share their knowledge and experience. This, in turn, contributes to the acceleration of scientific development and the wider perspective of the scientific community [4][5][6][7][8][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”

“…Academic meetings were also affected and could not be held face-toface due to the high risk of disease transmission person to person [2]. Under these circumstances, scientific events such international and national ophthalmology meetings had to be organized online on online platforms [3][4][5][6][7][8][9].…”