Roots and Constructs of Incivility in Professional Nursing Education: A South African Perspective

Background: Uncivil behaviour in higher education has been highlighted as a concern (Ausbrooks, Jones, Tijerina, 2011). According to recent reports, such behaviour may be increasing, thus jeopardizing the welfare of faculty, students, and the overall educational process. Nursing education has not been excluded from this behaviour (Clark, Olender, Cardoni & Kenski, 2011). Incivility as a reality in nursing education (Galo, 2012) has invaded academia, both in the classroom as well as the clinical environment which is an extension of nursing (Clark, Olender, Cardoni & Kenski, 2011). Nursing is a profession and an important skill that students must constantly exhibit is professional behaviour (White, 2013). The goal of education therefore is to develop students into empathetic nurses, but the impact of incivility may be of such nature that it can prevent the nursing student to develop this ability (Schaeffer, 2013). As the nursing profession and nursing faculty find these student behaviours worrisome and concerning it is said to becoming an element of stress for faculty. However this may be a two- way phenomenon as students also complain that they are being disrespected by their professors. Some of the causes put forward for both faculty and student incivility is attributed to a high stress environment, lack of professional environment, entitlement, faculty incompetence and students not interested in nursing (Clark & Springer, 2007). As various incidents of incivility in nursing education are put forward no empirical data addresses the roots of these problems. A lot of work needs to be done to understand the issue of incivility in nursing education and especially in South Africa as there is a scarcity of recorded information. To investigate the meaning that people who provide and participate in nursing education attach to incivility and the best practices of dealing with such concerns would therefore be of great importance to nursing education in South Africa.

Purpose:The purpose of the presentation would be to develop awareness on one of the critical problems in professional nursing education today with particular reference to issues of incivility. The presentation would demonstrate what plans would be made to understand and manage the problems of incivility in nursing education and training in South Africa.

Method:A qualitative grounded theory design will be applied to develop South African nursing education’s construct of incivility, and to explore the roots of incivility at the college and university based nursing schools from the perspectives of the people involved. Purposive sampling will be employed to select nurse educators and students from different nursing education settings in South Africa after which in-depth individual face- to- face interviews will be conducted with open-ended questions until data saturation is reached. Consensus workshops will be conducted after this with various nursing education stakeholders whereby information gathered through interviews will be presented. When an agreement is reached the construct of incivility for South African nursing education will be formulated and then strategies and solutions for South African nursing education schools will be developed.

Corbin and Strauss (2008) systematic procedures will be used for data analysis and the ATLAS.ti computer programme will be applied to assist with the data analysis process. In grounded theory validity and reliability is proved through trustworthiness therefore the indicators of credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmablity will be applied in this proposed study. The researcher applied to the University of the Western Cape’s Senate Research Committee for approval of the methodology and ethics of the proposed study.

Conclusion: This is work in progress and from the final data after analysis and confirmation from participants, a construct using a full grown tree framework is expected to emerge. This would contribute to the understanding of incivility in South African professional nursing education and how the problem would be managed.