An international cross-cultural study of nursing students' perceptions of caring

Single studies suggest that nursing students perceive caring as more an instrumental than expressive behaviour and indicate some differences between caring perceptions in junior and senior nursing students. However, there are limited studies investigating caring perceptions in nursing students across multiple cultures.

To determine perceptions of caring in Slovene, Croatian, Chinese and Russian nursing students and explore whether there are statistically significant differences in perceptions of caring between countries and between first and third-year nursing students.

A cross-sectional descriptive study design was used.

The study included 604 nursing students enrolled in first and third year in seven different nursing faculties in four countries: Slovenia; China; Croatia; and the Russian Federation.

The 25-item Caring Dimension Inventory (CDI-25) was used to measure caring perceptions. We also included demographic questions regarding age, gender, country, year of study and type of study. Demographic data were analysed using descriptive analysis while a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) adjusted for unequal sample sizes was performed together with a post hoc analysis of the results.

The results of two-way ANOVA showed that both main effects (country and year of study) were statistically significant, as well as their interaction at the 0.05 significance level. The main effect for country was F(3, 596) = 3.591, p < 0.0136 indicating a significant difference in CDI-25 between Slovenia (M = 108.9, SD = 9.2), Russian Federation (M = 107.1, SD = 8.2), China (M = 102.8, SD = 9.7) and Croatia (M = 110.0, SD = 8.6).

Perceptions of caring in nursing students differ across countries, probably due to different educational systems, curricula, cultural differences and societal values. Implementing caring theories in nursing curricula could help students to cultivate caring during their education.