Developing an instrument to measure nurses' attitudes towards nursing students during clinical practice: A...

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Clinical Practice
• Healthcare Professional Development

Background:

• Nurses' attitudes towards nursing students are crucial for effective clinical education.
• Evaluating these attitudes is essential for improving nursing practice and education.
• A validated tool is needed to systematically assess nurse-student interactions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a reliable measurement tool for assessing nurses' attitudes toward nursing students in clinical settings.
• To provide a quantitative instrument for evaluating the quality of clinical practice experiences for nursing students.

Main Methods:

• Quantitative cross-sectional design conducted in a Turkish public hospital with 364 participating nurses.
• Scale development involved literature review, expert validation, and psychometric analyses including EFA, CFA, and reliability testing.
• Statistical analyses included Lawshe's CVR, KMO, Bartlett's test, PCA, Varimax rotation, Cronbach's Alpha, Spearman, and Wilcoxon tests.

Main Results:

• Exploratory factor analysis identified a 22-item scale with five sub-dimensions: clinical experience/ethics, collaboration, desire to learn, continuous development, and communication skills.
• The total scale achieved a Cronbach's alpha of 0.903, with sub-dimension alphas ranging from 0.736 to 0.811.
• Test-retest reliability confirmed significant relationships between all items and factor scores (p < 0.001).

Conclusions:

• The developed scale is a valid and reliable instrument for measuring nurses' attitudes towards nursing students during clinical practice.
• This tool can be utilized to assess and enhance the clinical learning environment for nursing students.
• Findings support the use of this scale for quality improvement initiatives in nursing education and practice.