The research team, led by Emire Çitaku of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje and Ekrem Çitaku of the University Clinical Dental Center of Kosovo and Iliria College in Prishtina, set out to fill a conspicuous gap. Although the determinants of medical career choice have been studied extensively in Western Europe and North America, empirical evidence from Kosovo has remained limited. That gap matters for a practical reason: health workforce planners cannot design effective recruitment and retention strategies without knowing what draws people into medicine in the first place and what keeps them committed once they are in practice. The study was conceived explicitly as an exploratory contribution to that planning conversation.

Methodologically, the investigation took the form of a cross-sectional survey conducted between January and June 2019. The researchers recruited 300 participants drawn from three groups that together span the arc of a medical career: current medical students, practicing physicians and dentists. Recruitment used a convenience sampling approach, meaning participants were selected based on accessibility rather than random selection from the full population, a design choice the authors frame as appropriate for an exploratory study but one that warrants caution when generalizing to all Kosovar health professionals. Data were collected with a structured, anonymous paper-based questionnaire administered in Albanian, a format designed to encourage candid responses on a topic as personal as career motivation.

On the analytical side, the team processed the responses using IBM SPSS Statistics version 25. Descriptive statistics, including frequencies and percentages, were used to map the overall distribution of answers, while chi-square tests of independence were applied to probe whether particular variables, such as gender or career stage, were statistically associated with specific attitudes. The significance threshold was set at p less than 0.05, the conventional benchmark in health services research for treating an observed association as unlikely to be a product of chance alone. The study received ethics approval from the Ethics Committee of Iliria College in Prishtina, with informed consent obtained through voluntary participation in the anonymous survey, and the work was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The headline result concerns who actually makes the decision to pursue medicine. Nearly half of the participants, 49.0 percent, reported that they chose their medical career independently, while 39.0 percent indicated that their parents influenced the decision. In other words, in Kosovo’s medical community, self-determination is the single most common mode of career choice, but family influence remains a powerful secondary force touching a substantial minority of professionals. This duality is striking because it captures, in a single dataset, the tension between the individualistic narrative of the self-made doctor and the collectivist family dynamics that characterize much of Balkan society, where parental expectations about prestigious, stable professions continue to carry real weight.

Satisfaction with the chosen profession emerged as another central finding. Overall, 71.3 percent of respondents reported being satisfied or very satisfied with their career choice, a figure that suggests the profession retains a strong core of contentment despite the pressures that come with medical work in a health system still consolidating after decades of political and economic upheaval. Perhaps more intriguing was the comparison across career stages: students demonstrated a slightly higher proportion of being very satisfied compared to practicing professionals. That gradient, small as it is, will be familiar to workforce researchers elsewhere, since the transition from the idealism of medical school to the daily realities of clinical practice, administrative burden and resource constraints tends to erode enthusiasm. The Kosovo data suggest the same pattern may be operating there, though the exploratory design means the authors stop short of causal claims.

Commitment to the profession appears robust. A clear majority of participants, 80.7 percent, indicated that they would not change their profession if given the choice again. That figure is a meaningful signal for retention, because intention to stay is one of the strongest practical predictors of actual workforce stability. Yet the survey also uncovered gendered fault lines that complicate the rosy aggregate picture. The researchers observed a statistically significant association between gender and intention to change profession, with p equal to 0.023, and between gender and willingness to recommend the profession to others, with p equal to 0.007. While the abstract does not detail the direction of these differences, the mere existence of significant gender effects is consequential: it suggests that male and female medical professionals in Kosovo may experience the profession differently, a pattern often linked in international literature to disparities in career progression, work-life balance and workplace support.

For health workforce planners, the implications the authors draw are concrete. They argue that medical career choice in Kosovo reflects a balance between individual autonomy and family influence, and that the generally high satisfaction levels are encouraging, but the differences observed across career stages should inform discussions on workforce support strategies. Their recommendations center on integrating career guidance, mentoring and retention-focused interventions into health workforce planning. In practice, that could mean structured mentoring programs that connect students with practicing clinicians, career counseling that helps young people make informed and self-directed choices, and targeted support for practicing professionals whose satisfaction has dipped relative to their student counterparts. The gender-related associations add a further layer, implying that retention policies may need to be tailored rather than one-size-fits-all if they are to keep both men and women committed to clinical careers.

The study’s limitations deserve honest acknowledgment, and the authors themselves frame the work as exploratory. The convenience sample of 300 participants, while substantial for a small health system, cannot guarantee representativeness of all Kosovar medical professionals. The cross-sectional design captures a snapshot in time, here from 2019, and cannot establish whether the family influence observed at career entry persists or fades over a professional lifetime, nor whether the satisfaction gap between students and practitioners widens with age. Self-reported satisfaction is also inherently subjective and may be shaped by social desirability, particularly in a cultural context where expressing doubt about a prestigious career choice may carry stigma. The data were collected within a Master’s research project under institutional academic oversight, with the 2026 ethics approval covering secondary analysis and publication of the previously collected anonymized data.

Even with those caveats, the research fills a genuine void. Kosovo’s health system faces the same pressures confronting much of the region: emigration of skilled professionals, aging clinical workforces and limited fiscal capacity for retention incentives. Evidence about what motivates people to enter medicine and what keeps them satisfied is a prerequisite for evidence-based workforce policy, and until now, Kosovo has lacked it. By quantifying the split between independent and parental decision-making, documenting that roughly seven in ten professionals are content with their choice and that more than eight in ten would not change professions, and flagging significant gender differences in commitment, the study gives planners a starting baseline. Whether mentoring schemes and career guidance can convert that baseline into long-term workforce sustainability is now the question that policymakers in Prishtina, and researchers watching from abroad, will be asking next.

Subject of Research: Determinants of medical career choice and professional satisfaction among medical students, physicians and dentists in Kosovo

Article Title: Medical career choice and satisfaction with the chosen profession in Kosovo: exploratory insights for health workforce planning

Article References: Çitaku, E., Çitaku, E., Mrasori, S., & Krasniqi, B. (2026). Medical career choice and satisfaction with the chosen profession in Kosovo: exploratory insights for health workforce planning. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15524-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15524-9

Keywords: medical career choice, job satisfaction, health workforce planning, Kosovo, medical education, parental influence, retention, career guidance, mentoring, cross-sectional study, gender differences, physicians

The researchers organized parental influence into five distinct constructs grounded in Developmental Systems Theory: parental characteristics such as age, ethnicity, and marital status; the home learning environment, meaning the structural resources and routines that surround a child; parental involvement, defined as direct behavioral engagement like shared reading, storytelling, and educational play; parent-teacher collaboration, the bidirectional partnership between families and schools; and socioeconomic status, encompassing income, education, and occupational standing. The theory frames development as the dynamic interplay of genetic, environmental, biological, and cultural factors, with parents providing the knowledge, resources, and supportive conditions that prepare children for formal schooling.

The search strategy was exhaustive. Following the PRISMA guidelines, the team queried Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest for studies published between 2016 and 2025, initially retrieving 22,906 records. After removing duplicates, screening titles and abstracts, and conducting full-text reviews with inter-rater reliability reaching a Cohen’s kappa of 0.97, only 26 studies survived. Eligible studies had to examine children aged two to eight, include at least one parental or household predictor, and assess school readiness across at least three dimensions such as early literacy, numeracy, and writing. The included samples ranged from 65 to 11,326 participants and spanned North America, Central Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia, and Africa.

Methodological rigor anchored the analysis. The researchers converted correlation coefficients and standardized regression weights into a common metric using Fisher’s z transformations, applied inverse-variance weighting so that large-sample studies carried proportionate statistical weight, and employed random-effects models to account for genuine variation across studies. Publication bias was checked with Begg’s and Egger’s tests, and sensitivity analyses confirmed that no single study distorted the pooled estimates. Non-significant associations were retained and coded as zero, ensuring that the synthesis did not silently inflate positive findings.

The headline result is striking in its simplicity. Parental involvement showed the strongest association with school readiness, with a pooled effect size of r = 0.21 (95% confidence interval: 0.12 to 0.29, p < 0.001), a small-to-moderate but highly robust correlation. Socioeconomic status and the home learning environment tied for second at r = 0.17 each, followed by parent-teacher collaboration at r = 0.135 and parental characteristics at r = 0.108. When all five factors were combined across the full set of 26 studies, the pooled effect was r = 0.157, with every included study reporting a positive correlation ranging from 0.04 to 0.34. In plain terms, the everyday things parents do reading books, telling stories, playing educational games consistently outperform demographic advantage as predictors of whether children arrive at school prepared.

This finding carries real weight because it challenges a persistent narrative that a child’s academic trajectory is largely fixed by family income. SES certainly mattered, and the mechanism is intuitive: higher-income and better-educated parents can purchase learning materials, access enriching opportunities, and enjoy the time and emotional bandwidth for daily learning. But the meta-analysis shows that engagement, the proximal process of parent and child interacting over shared activities, exerts a stronger direct effect. Under Developmental Systems Theory, this fits precisely: SES and parental characteristics operate indirectly, creating conditions that make close interactions possible, while involvement is the interaction itself. Children’s development, the evidence suggests, depends most on the quality and frequency of those everyday encounters.

The moderation analyses added a second surprise. Child age significantly and negatively moderated the effect of parent-teacher collaboration (r = −0.171, p = 0.011), meaning that the benefit of family-school partnership diminishes as children grow older. Young children entering preschool appear to profit most when parents and teachers coordinate closely, attending meetings, volunteering, and communicating about progress, while older children, perhaps gaining independence in their learning, require less of it. This gives educators a concrete developmental window: structured collaboration programs, such as the Getting Ready for School intervention cited in the review, should be concentrated in the earliest years rather than spread thin across elementary education.

Gender produced a subtler pattern. Child gender significantly moderated the relationship between parental involvement and school readiness (r = −0.161, p = 0.019), indicating that boys and girls derive different benefits from parental engagement, possibly due to differing learning preferences or parental expectations. For every other parental factor, socioeconomic status, home learning environment, parental characteristics, and the combined effect, neither gender nor age reached significance, suggesting that the advantages of a supportive home and adequate resources are broadly consistent across demographic groups. Only involvement, the strongest lever of all, appears to work somewhat differently depending on whether the child is a boy or a girl, hinting that family-centered interventions may benefit from tailoring.

The authors are candid about limitations. Heterogeneity was substantial across analyses, with I-squared values exceeding 80 percent in most, indicating that contextual factors such as culture, measurement tools, and unmeasured moderators shape the underlying effects. The reviewed studies varied in methods, samples, and cultural settings, and some parental factor categories rested on few studies, so the findings should be read as indicative rather than definitive. The analysis also did not probe specific parenting styles, such as authoritative versus permissive approaches, and left moderators like teacher characteristics and school resources for future work. Culturally responsive interpretation remains essential, since involvement, home environments, and family-school relationships are expressed differently across societies.

Even so, the practical implications are difficult to ignore. The evidence supports prioritizing direct parental engagement in learning activities over policies focused solely on economic relief, though the authors note that accessible early childhood education and parental leave indirectly strengthen parent-child interaction. Home-visiting programs such as Parents as Teachers and Early Head Start, home-based literacy initiatives, parental training workshops, and frameworks like the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships all align with what the data show works. For a generation of parents anxious about kindergarten readiness, the message is quietly empowering: the most powerful tool for preparing a child for school is not the bank account, but the daily, deliberate act of learning together.

Subject of Research: The effects of parental roles on early childhood school readiness

Article Title: Systematic review and meta-analysis of parental roles in early childhood school readiness

Article References: Józsa, K., & Oo, T. Z. (2026). Systematic review and meta-analysis of parental roles in early childhood school readiness. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00055-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00055-2

Keywords: school readiness, parental involvement, meta-analysis, early childhood education, socioeconomic status, home learning environment, parent-teacher collaboration, developmental systems theory, early literacy, numeracy, child development, PRISMA

The study focused on two female Vietnamese-American college students, aged 20 and 21, whose stories were drawn from a broader investigation of sexual and health development among Vietnamese-American emerging adults. Each participant completed a semi-structured interview, and the transcripts were subjected to positioning analysis, a discourse-based method rooted in the work of Rom Harré and Luk van Langenhove. Rather than asking what identities participants possess, positioning analysis examines how people actively position themselves and others within the stories they tell—how a speaker casts herself as obedient daughter, autonomous young woman, or committed partner in different narrative moments. This lens allowed the researchers to capture the fluid, sometimes contradictory ways the young women made sense of romance in relation to family and culture.

The theoretical scaffolding for the study draws on the concept of emerging adulthood, the life stage spanning roughly the late teens through the twenties that Jeffrey Arnett has characterized as a period of identity exploration and instability. Arnett himself has emphasized that emerging adulthood is not culturally uniform, and the present study builds on that insight. For second-generation immigrants, developmental scholars have long noted, the transition to adulthood involves negotiating normative conflicts between the heritage culture of the family and the mainstream culture of the society at large. Romantic relationships sit squarely at the center of this negotiation: they touch on dating, mate selection, sexuality, religion, and ultimately marriage—all domains in which parental expectations tend to be most pronounced.

The findings highlight three interlocking processes in the participants’ stories. The first was religious influence transmitted through parental belief systems. The researchers found that parents’ religious commitments did not merely function as a set of rules to follow or reject; they operated as an interpretive backdrop against which the young women evaluated their own romantic feelings and choices. In this sense, religious and cultural expectations were inherited not simply as doctrine but as a vocabulary of meaning, shaping what felt like an appropriate partner, an appropriate pace, and an appropriate future for a romantic relationship.

The second process involved societal values and the construction of one’s own context. The participants did not experience their cultural worlds as two rigid blocs in conflict. Rather, they selectively drew on culturally available expectations—both Vietnamese and American—as resources for interpreting their experiences. When these expectations clashed, the young women engaged in what the authors describe as reconciling competing ideals of closeness and autonomy. They wanted to remain emotionally connected to their families while also claiming the right to author their own romantic lives. The study suggests that this reconciliation is an active developmental achievement, not a passive accommodation.

Perhaps the most striking finding is the role of graduated disclosure in how romantic identity was constructed. Rather than presenting parents with a completed decision—a boyfriend, a relationship, a plan—the participants moved through carefully staged revelations, testing the waters and calibrating how much to share and when. Disclosure functioned as a developmental tool: each incremental act of telling reshaped the relational field between daughter and parents, gradually transforming a private “I” into a shared “we.” The word “through us” in the study’s title captures this insight. Romantic identity, on this account, is not achieved inside the individual and then announced to the family; it is co-constructed through the very conversations that bring it into family awareness.

Technically, the study’s narrative approach treats identity as something performed in storytelling rather than reported as a stable trait. Positioning analysis attends to the discursive production of selves: who is positioned as agent, who as authority, who as beneficiary in each narrative episode. This methodological choice matters because it lets researchers track identity in motion. Instead of coding participants as either “traditional” or “acculturated,” the analysis reveals how a single speaker can occupy multiple positions across a single interview—deferring to parental wishes in one moment, asserting personal preference in the next, and often blending the two into hybrid accounts that honor both heritage and self.

The implications reach beyond Vietnamese-American communities. Asian Americans represent one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States, and prior research has documented that parent–child acculturation gaps—differences in how strongly each generation endorses heritage versus mainstream values—are associated with tension around dating and mate selection. Studies of Asian American emerging adults have linked parent–adolescent relationship quality and ethnic identity to romantic attachment patterns, and recent reviews have called for deeper, process-oriented accounts of how Asian young people actually navigate romantic development rather than snapshot measures of attitudes. By focusing on process, the new study answers that call in a way that quantitative surveys cannot.

The authors also see direct applications for clinical practice. Therapists working with second-generation immigrant clients often encounter conflicts that surface around romance: secrecy about relationships, anxiety about parental disapproval, or guilt over perceived betrayals of family expectations. The study’s findings suggest that clinicians should not frame these conflicts simply as individual pathology or as family dysfunction. Instead, they can be understood as culturally significant developmental work—clients’ attempts to reconcile closeness and autonomy using the interpretive resources their culture provides. Recognizing graduated disclosure as a legitimate and adaptive strategy, rather than as avoidance, may help clinicians support clients in ways that respect both family bonds and personal growth.

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Springfield College and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent obtained from all participants and data anonymized to protect privacy. The authors acknowledge the study’s limits: with two participants, the findings are not statistically generalizable, and the accounts reflect the perspectives of college-educated women at a particular developmental moment. Yet this is precisely the kind of depth-oriented, theory-generating work that qualitative narrative research is designed to deliver. By following two young women as they narrated the passage from an independent “I” to a relational “we”—through the shared space of “us”—the study offers a vivid, technically grounded account of how culture is not a background variable in romantic development but an active, intimate participant in it. For the millions of young adults straddling two cultural worlds, the message is both simple and profound: falling in love is also an act of translation, performed in dialogue with the people who raised you.

Subject of Research: Romantic identity development among Vietnamese-American emerging adults navigating parental influence and cultural expectations

Article Title: From I to we Through us: Romantic Identity Development in Vietnamese-American Emerging Adults

Article References: From I to we Through us: Romantic Identity Development in Vietnamese-American Emerging Adults. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00541-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00541-8

Keywords: romantic identity, emerging adulthood, Vietnamese American, narrative analysis, positioning analysis, parental influence, cultural expectations, bicultural identity, qualitative research, second-generation immigrants, graduated disclosure, cultural psychology