Medical Students' Perceptions of the Value of Communication Skills and Their Attitudes Towards Learning Soft Skills

Effective communication skills are essential for clinical practice; medical students' attitudes toward physician-patient communication are a real concern among the medical community. The present study aims to investigate the positive and negative attitudes of RUDN University medical students toward learning communication skills and to compare our findings with those from other countries. We adopted the Communication Skills Attitudes Scale (CSAS) as the primary research instrument due to its widespread use, validity, and reliability. First-and second-year medical students (n = 300) completed an online 26-item questionnaire, and all responses were analyzed using SPSS v. 20. Our study findings demonstrate that medical students consider learning communication skills essential for their professional clinical practices and for fostering a healthy environment between doctors and patients. We found that students had significantly more positive attitudes towards learning communication skills. Furthermore, statistically significant differences were found between the positive attitude scale and the negative attitude scale between male and female students. Overall, the findings of principal component analysis suggest the differences in eight components out of twenty-six items in many aspects from those of earlier research studies. The study concludes that attitudes towards communication skills are very important in guiding the communication skills of medical students and help them more broadly in learning communication skills. © 2025 ACADEMY PUBLICATION.