Perceptions of Academic Grief in Baccalaureate Nursing Programs: An Instrument Development Study

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Psychology
• Instrument Development

Background:

• Nursing students and graduates often face significant emotional distress, including grief, when encountering academic setbacks such as failing to meet curricular benchmarks or pass the NCLEX-RN examination.
• Academic failure in nursing programs can lead to profound psychological impact, necessitating the development of tools to understand and measure this experience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate the Perceptions of Academic Grief (PAG) instrument.
• To measure academic grief among baccalaureate nursing program completers who have experienced academic failure.

Main Methods:

• Content analysis was employed to generate initial items for the instrument, ensuring face validity.
• Focus group interviews and expert judgment were utilized to establish content validity.
• A pilot test was conducted on a 40-item instrument with a sample of 70 registered nurses and nursing students.

Main Results:

• The highest-ranked items indicated feelings of disappointment, a strong desire to persevere, acknowledgment of life investment in nursing education, and fear of future failure.
• The developed instrument demonstrated a high internal consistency with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of .94.
• Pilot testing provided initial evidence of the PAG instrument's reliability and validity.

Conclusions:

• The Perceptions of Academic Grief (PAG) instrument was successfully developed to assess academic grief in nursing students and registered nurses.
• The PAG instrument shows promising initial reliability and validity, suggesting its potential utility in evaluating the emotional impact of academic failure in nursing education.
• Further testing and validation are recommended to solidify the instrument's psychometric properties for broader application.