Abstract
The purpose of this study was to identify how nurse's image was perceived by nursing college students. The subjects included were 315 students experienced clinical practice during $20{\sim}22$ weeks and 134 students not with a total of 449 nursing students in Gwangju and Chonnam. The data were collected from November 21 to December 5, 2001 by the structured questionnaires. The research tool was measured by 30 items divided into four dimensions; traditional, professional, social and personal image of nurse. Cronbach $\alpha$ for the tool of nurse's image was 0.8960. The data were analysed by SPSS 8.0 for Windows program using frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, t-test, ANOVA and scheffe. The results of this study were as follows; 1. In the nurse's image related to general characteristics, there were significant differences for school graduation, applicative motivation, interpersonal relationship and image forming factor. 2. In the Image forming factors, nursing college students perceived the nurse's image by visiting hospital or admission(37.9%), watching TV(25.8) and others; nurses' appearance during clinical experience(16.3). 3. The mean score for nurse's image of clinical experience group (2.76$\pm$0.28) was lower than that of non-clinical experience group(2.89$\pm$0.31) in significance (t=4.319, p=0.000). 4. In the nurse's image according to clinical experience, there were significant differences for traditional, professional, social, personal image between two groups and the lower mean scores were found in the clinical experience group in all dimensions. The ranks of dimensions were professional image(3.08), traditional image(2.76), social image(2.65), the personal image(2.59) in clinical experience group, whereas professional image(3.21), traditional image(2.93), social image(2.75), personal image(2.71) for non-clinical experience group.5. The high score items of nurse's image were 'worthwhile work(3.48)', 'always working hard(3.30)', 'profession(3.17)', 'strong responsibility toward work(3.08)', 'have a high technical skill(3.05)' in clinical experience group and 'worthwhile work(3.69)', 'always working hard(3.28)', 'clean and decent(3.22)', 'profession(3.21)', 'have a bountiful professional knowledge(3.18)' in non-clinical experience group. 6. The highest mean score for nurse's image related to the image forming factors was 86.8 by novels or literature and the second highest was 84.3 by visiting hospital or admission. And others(mean=82.1)was the most negative nurse's image by clinical experience. In conclusion, nurse's image perceived by nursing college students will be the mirror of themselves. And clinical experience will be the important opportunity to form the professional image with white uniformed nurses in future. Therefore it is important for clinical nurses to play professional roles rightly so that nursing students could form positive nurse's image.
(Department of Nursing, Chunnam Techno College)
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