The use of student narratives as research substrates

Supervising medical students to develop a research project can be challenging. Unless a student has prior experience in research, they may struggle to identify a research question that can be addressed by a novice researcher in a time-limited project. At the same time, when a project spans years of the degree, a student who has been offered an “off-the-shelf” idea may lose interest in the project and the assignment can become burdensome. We describe how a cohort of medical students were encouraged to focus their project ideas on a story of someone whose medical problem was of interest to them. Most students opted to conduct a literature review based on their “story”. Here we present their stories and describe how they were led to this point in the process