| Learning Objective #1: Identify four sources of stress experienced by undergraduate nursing students | |||
| Learning Objective #2: Describe health-promoting behaviors practiced by 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.
Back to Promoting Students' Success
Back to 14th International Nursing Research Congress
Sigma Theta Tau International
10-12 July 2003