Determination of Professional Belonging Level and Affecting Factors in Student and Working Midwives

Abstract

Objective: The research has been carried out to determine the professional belonging of the undergraduate senior students studying midwifery at universities in Turkey and the midwives with a bachelor’s degree who are actively working as midwives in the field. Methods: The descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted with 174 midwifery senior undergraduate students studying at universities in Turkey and 171 midwives with a bachelor’s degree in the field between January 17 and April 29, 2022. The data were gathered through Google Survey Forms using introductory information form prepared by the researchers, including socio-demographic characteristics, views on the midwifery profession, professional activity information, and the Midwifery Belonging Scale. The number percent distribution, the chi-square analysis, the Mann Whitney U test, and the Kruskall Wallis test were used in the evaluation of the data, and the post-hoc Bonferonni test was used in the further analysis. Results: 50.43% of the participants in the research are senior undergraduate students, and 49.57% of them are working midwives. The total average score of the student midwives on the midwifery belonging scale is 93.18±10.01, and 90.21±13.18 for the working midwives. While a statistical difference was found between the student midwives and the working midwives in the emotional belonging sub-dimension mean scores of the scale, no difference was found in the other sub-dimension mean scores (p