| Learning Objective #1: acquire understanding about Taiwanese nursing students’ perception of menarche and menstruation | |||
| Learning Objective #2: enhance skills to promote culturally competent care for Taiwanese nursing students’ health and well-beings |
Design and methods: An ethnography method was adopted, using in-depth interviews with 29 informants who were Taiwanese female nursing students were voluntary recruited in the study. This research applied a semi-structured interview guide which contained 5 open-ended inquiries regarding views of menarche, experiencing menstrual period and views of menstruation. Audio-taped were permitted by all of the participants and transcribed verbatim. Leininger's (1991) qualitative data analysis was used to analyze the data.
Results: Four themes were extracted from the analysis, including: “Ambiguous feelings moved upward in between gender stigma and confidence,” How inconvenient event and dilemma situation as a women. Becoming a woman was an exciting and normally event as a real woman. “Sharing a privacy episode with intimate women who are mothers, sisters and close friends,” “Waiting and expecting a friend coming periodically,” and “Dealing with the menstruation happening with cultural context pattern.”
Conclusions: These findings indicated that Taiwanese female nursing students carried with them the values, beliefs, and life ways of their own culture and stereotypes about menarche and menstruation experiences. Nursing professionals and educators can obtain the experiences of perceptions among Taiwanese female nursing students and apply competent intervention to help them overcome the ambiguous and dilemma of perception within diverse cultures. The results of this study could promote cultural competence care and health education for female nursing students within the context of culturally.