Exploration of the Observation Hours Admissions Criterion in Physical Therapy Doctoral Programs
Purpose/Hypothesis: Inclusion of observation hours as an admissions criterion is common across physical therapy doctoral programs; however, the specific number of required or recommended hours varies greatly. While the inclusion and influence of other common admissions criteria (e.g. prerequisite grade point average) have been investigated, the observation hours criterion is relatively unexplored. Given that this criterion requires resource commitments from prospective students and local clinicians, further understanding of this criterion is needed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the current scope of the observation hours criterion and assess geographic trends across programs. We hypothesized that programs set observation hours criteria that are similar to those of their surrounding programs.
Number of Subjects: 248 physical therapy doctoral programs accredited by the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education (CAPTE) and based in the United States.
Materials and Methods: Observation hour requirements for CAPTE-accredited physical therapy programs were collected using the Physical Therapist Centralized Application Service (PTCAS) website and individual program websites. Program contact addresses were pulled from the public CAPTE website and translated into GPS coordinates for geographic relationship analyses. Descriptive statistics were applied to identify the scope of the data set. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed with Moran’s I using a nearest neighbor (Haversine distance, k=10) weighting scheme; inferential statistics were computed using resampling methods.
Results: Among 248 programs, 225 programs (90.7%) required or highly recommended completion of observation hours as an admissions criterion. Program requirements ranged from zero to 300 hours, with a median of 50 hours. A significant spatial autocorrelation in criterion hours was discovered (I = 0.14, p < 0.001), with a mean nearest neighbor trend line showing a plausible range of 40 hours across all programs.
Conclusions: The observation hours criterion tends to be similar among neighboring programs, with some localities requiring an average of 40 more hours than others. The existence of variability in the requirement was quantified.
Clinical Relevance: These findings demonstrate that programs’ decisions on the number of required observation hours may be influenced by surrounding programs’ requirements. This raises questions of how the number of required observation hours is currently determined, how it should be determined, and what influence the number of required observation hours has on applicants’ decision-making. [Disclaimer: CAPTE bears no responsibility for interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analysis of the data.]