Nursing students' care behavior toward sexual and gender diverse populations: An analysis based on temporal...

Nursing students often exhibit positive attitudes toward SGD populations but struggle to translate these attitudes into clinical caring behaviors. TST provides an effective framework for exploring the intention-behavior gap by integrating rational motivations and automatic determinants. This study aimed to examine the predictive factors of caring behavior toward sexual and gender diverse (SGD) populations among nursing students based on temporal self-regulation theory (TST), specifically exploring the roles of empathic beliefs, temporal valuation, intention, behavioral prepotency, and self-regulatory capacity.

A cross-sectional survey design was employed. The study involved a sample of 257 nursing students who had completed at least three months of clinical practice in a nursing college in Taipei, Taiwan. Data were collected using structured questionnaires and analyzed using multiple linear regression and moderation and mediation analyses.

Intention, empathic beliefs, and behavioral prepotency positively predicted caring behavior, accounting for 31% of the total variance. Contrary to traditional TST expectations, neither self-regulatory capacity nor behavioral prepotency moderated the relationship between intention and caring behaviors. However, intention and behavioral prepotency only partially mediated the relationship between empathic beliefs and caring behaviors. Crucially, a significant sequential mediation path was established from empathic beliefs to intention to behavioral prepotency to caring behavior.

Cultivating empathy is fundamental in forming professional intentions to provide inclusive care, which gradually helps automate these practices into students' behavioral repertoires. Nursing curricula should incorporate targeted empathy-guided interventions to bridge the gap between intention and caring behavior and promote care quality in SGD populations.