Nursing Students' Attitudes Toward Poverty: Does Experiential Learning Make a Difference?

Area of Science:

• Social Sciences
• Nursing Education
• Public Health

Background:

• Growing global poverty necessitates understanding its social determinants.
• Nursing students require education on social justice to address health inequities effectively.
• Current attitudes toward poverty may be overly focused on individual behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the impact of an experiential activity on undergraduate nursing students' perspectives of poverty.
• To determine if attitudes shifted from a behavioral to a structural understanding of poverty.
• To explore implications for nursing curricula regarding social justice.

Main Methods:

• Undergraduate nursing students participated in an experiential learning activity.
• The Attitude Toward Poverty-Short Form was administered pre- and post-activity.
• A control group received no experiential activity for comparison.

Main Results:

• The experimental group showed a statistically significant shift towards a structural perspective of poverty.
• No significant attitude change was observed in the control group.
• The experiential activity effectively influenced students' understanding of poverty's societal causes.

Conclusions:

• Experiential learning can effectively alter nursing students' perspectives on poverty.
• Nursing education should incorporate social justice components to foster structural understanding.
• This approach can better prepare nurses to address poverty-related health disparities.