Caring is the core and the essence of nursing (Nelson & Watson, 2012). Over the past decades, caring has gained increasing attention as one of the major criteria of professional nursing and has been related to patient outcomes and patient satisfaction (ANA, 2015; Dieppe, Roe, & Warber, 2015). Caring is so much a part of nursing that if nurses don't care, they have lost the heart of what it means to be nurses (Holopainen, Nyström, & Kasén, 2017). However, caring receives little to no attention in nursing education compared to the current emphasis on the acquisition of technical skills (Walker, Quinn, & Corder, 2016). Although instruments that evaluate the cognitive and psychomotor aspects of nursing students' performance have been well developed, there is no caring behaviors’ measuring instrument available that is designed from an educational perspective (Nelson & Watson, 2012; Porr & Egan, 2013). This indirectly lead nursing students to pay little attention to caring since it is not part of their performance evaluation.
It is essential that caring behaviors be evaluated during students' clinical training. Without such educational focus, nurses may remain unaware that caring behaviors, like any other skill, need to be developed, practiced and perfected (Labrague, 2012; Loke, Lee, Mohd Noor, 2015). Therefore, a valid and reliable instrument for measuring caring behaviors is needed to help cultivate and motivate nursing students' caring behaviors.
Objectives:
This study aimed at the development and the psychometric evaluation of an instrument to measure nursing students’ caring behaviors.
Methods:
The study consisted of two phases and five steps. The first phase concerned with the development of content domains and items, while the second phase focused on the initial psychometric evaluation and data analysis of the Nursing Students’ Caring Behaviors Scale (NSCBS). In Phase I, content domains were defined based on a qualitative study conducted by the researcher to examine the meaning of caring for the seriously ill patients. Scale items were generated, the instrument content validity was evaluated, and the instrument was pretested. In Phase II: The instrument was used to measure the caring behaviors of 112 nursing students. The derived data was analyzed to determine the construct validity and internal consistency reliability of the scale.
Results:
The study findings supported the scale’s content validity, construct validity and internal consistency reliability with a Content Validity Index (CVI) of 0.97 and a Cronbach's alpha of 0.93. The resulting scale consists of 28 items in three subscales. Subscale I: Having a relationship as a human being/Presencing, subscale II: Preserving patient's dignity & subscale III: Comforting.
Conclusion:
The Nursing Students Caring Behavior Scale (NSCBS) is a reliable and valid instrument to measure nursing students' caring behaviors. Further research is needed to accumulate evidence for the validity and reliability of the scale.