Monday, November 3, 2003

This presentation is part of : Well-being of Nursing Students

The Relationships of Hardiness, Stress, and Health-Promotion Behaviors in Female Generic Nursing Students

Victoria Rizzo Nikou, PhD, APRN, BC, Lienhard School of Nursing, Lienhard School of Nursing, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY, USA
Learning Objective #1: Identify four sources of stress in undergraduate nursing students
Learning Objective #2: Identify the relationship of stress and hardiness upon health-promotion behaviors in undergraduate nursing students

Objective: to investigate the relationships among hardiness, stress, and health-promoting behaviors in healthy, future nurses.

Design: exploratory correlational quantitative design.

Population, Sample, Setting, Years: 271 female generic nursing students from 66 US baccalaureate and associate degree programs, ages 18 to 50+; members of the National Student Nurses Association, voluntarily solicited while attending the 2000 NSNA Convention.

Concept or Variables Studied Together: : Pender’s health-promotion model, Lazarus’ stress, and Kobasa-Oulette’s hardiness model.

Methods: Instrumentation included the Personal Views Survey(PVS), the Student Stress Inventory(SSI), the Health-Promotion Lifestyle Profile II(HPLPII) and demographic data form; analyses of means, medians, and standard deviations for age and instrument scores, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients, and multiple regression analyses.

Findings: Hardiness was inversely related to stress and positively related to health-promoting behaviors; stress was negatively related to health-promoting behaviors; both were supported at the p<.001 level. Participants identified the nursing classroom as more stressful than the clinical.

Conclusions: Hardiness was significantly correlated with health-promoting behaviors and inversely correlated with reported perceptions of stress. Stress was significantly correlated with limited health-promoting behaviors. Health-promoting behaviors were better in this population than in previously reported studies measuring nursing students and registered nurses.

Implications: Since 81% of the participants indicated exposure to health-promotion principles in class nursing curriculum needs to continue to include these facts. The identification of a stress-resistant personality factor, hardiness, in students may also be viewed as a prediction of their stress-resistance as professional nurses. Due to the higher perceptions of stress in nursing classrooms, educators need to increase awareness of the need for stress-reduction programs and potential refinement of their classroom evaluation methods. Since nursing faculty was identified as good exemplars of health-promoting behaviors, educators need to be mindful of their role modeling behaviors.

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