Cultivating competent public health professionals: the role of research participation and academic motivation

The growing complexity of global public health issues necessitates a stronger focus on cultivating public health professionals with robust job competency. This study investigates the impact of research participation on the job competency of public health students and its underlying mechanisms. In April-June 2021, a cross-sectional study was conducted using a cluster sampling method to recruit 906 public health students from three universities in Shandong Province, China. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection. The entropy weight method was applied to assign weights to a self-constructed competency index system for evaluating individual job competency. Propensity score matching (PSM) was employed to assess the impact of research participation on competency. A mediation analysis was used to examine the role of academic motivation in this relationship. PSM analysis indicates that participation in research activities significantly enhances students' workplace competence. Among the three matching methods—nearest neighbour matching, radius matching, and kernel matching—the average treatment effect values for the intervention group (ATT) ranged between 0.037 and 0.041, all statistically significant at the 1% level. Mediation analysis indicates that research participation not only directly enhances competence but also produces a significant indirect statistical association (β = 0.0340, p = 0.001) by strengthening academic motivation. This mediating effect accounts for 12.6% of the total effect. Even after adjusting for observable confounding factors, there remains a significant association between public health students' participation in research activities and the enhancement of their professional competencies. This association encompasses both a direct link between research involvement and professional development, as well as an indirect link mediated through enhanced academic motivation. Given the cross-sectional design and analytical limitations of this study, the findings cannot establish causality but provide empirical evidence supporting the encouragement of student participation in public health education research. Consequently, it is recommended that supportive mechanisms be established to foster student involvement in research, thereby cultivating a cohort of public health professionals equipped with specialised competencies.