Self-esteem and student nurses: an account of a descriptive study

In this paper the authors describe a study of nursing students' self-reported self-esteem levels using a validated instrument: the Culture-Free Self-Esteem Inventory 2 (CFSEI-2). The research question was: How do student nurses rate their own self-esteem levels? The paper offers a short review of some of the literature, followed by a description of the sample (a convenience sample of 101 undergraduate nursing students), data collection and analysis methods and the findings. The self-esteem components of CFSEI-2 are general, personal and social and these terms are defined in the text of this paper. The findings indicated that the mean scores for this sample of nursing students fell within normal levels for all three components of self-esteem. Younger students were found to have higher scores for the social subscale, which indicates that they had a higher perception of the quality of their relationships with their peers. The findings of this study indicate that these undergraduate student nurses' perceptions of their self-esteem were comparable to the normal ranges of self-esteem as assessed by the instrument.