Child Abuse Awareness and Reporting Intention among Nursing and Education Students

Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate child abuse awareness and reporting intention among nursing and education students and correlations among the variables involved. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted by administering an online questionnaire to 70 nursing college students and 70 education college students. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, chi-squared test, the Mann-Whitney U test, and Pearson's correlation in SPSS 21.0 (IBM, Armonk, NY). Results: The mean score of child abuse awareness was $3.61{pm}0.32$ for nursing students and $3.60{pm}0.36$ for education students. The mean score of reporting intention was $5.65{pm}0.90$ for nursing students and $5.38{pm}1.03$ for education students. Females presented higher scores than males in the awareness of sexual abuse. The awareness of emotional abuse was higher in students who knew of reporting obligations or who had experienced abuse. Child abuse awareness and reporting intention were significantly positively correlated. Also, the number of times having received child abuse education was correlated with reporting intention in both mild and severe cases of abuse. Conclusion: Reporting intention is not only related to having received education, but also to the frequency of that education. Child abuse education is important to increase reporting intention and should be delivered repeatedly.