Medical education programs are responsible for educating medical students to meet the demands of a complex and fast-changing healthcare system, that requires competent, reflective, robust, and engaged students who can collaborate in interdisciplinary settings. In this article, we examine and discuss how social identities affect medical students’ learning approaches regarding how, what, and why they learn in clinical problem-based medical education. We conducted an ethnographic study at Aalborg University Hospital, involving 7 medical students for 240 hours of participant observation and 8 hours of semi-structured interviews. During the analysis, we found that medical students’ social identities as well as the clinical problem-based practice were strongly associated with how, what, and why they learn. We highlight that there is a very fine balance to be found between the assumed and assigned social identities in clinical problem-based medical education if a learning outcome of high quality is to be ensured
