Investigation and analysis of attitudes of nursing students in higher vocational towards death

Abstract

Objective To investigate and analyze the attitudes of higher vocational nursing students toward death and the related effect factors.Methods Totally 324 nursing students in a higher vocational school in Shaanxi province were investigated with death attitude profile-revised scale.Contents of investigation included physical and mental health status,family members' attitude towards death,family form and ranking,religion,presence of suicidal thoughts,exposure to mass media reports about death,reading books about death,death fear,death escape,natural acceptance,approach acceptance,avoidance acceptance,etc.SPSS 16.0 was used for data entry and statistic analysis,mean and standard deviation for statistical description,t test and variance analysis for statistical inference.Results ①Higher vocational nursing students got the highest average score (3.93 ± 0.55) in the dimension of natural acceptance.②In the dimension of avoidance acceptance,the scores of nursing students with excellent and good physical and mental health were significantly lower than those of students with general physical and mental health (F=4.80,P=0.009) ; the scores of nursing students in single parent family were significantly higher than those of students in other family forms (F=4.59,P=0.004) ; the scores of nursing students with suicidal thoughts were significantly higher than those of students without (t=-4.77,P=0.000).In the dimension of death avoidance,the scores of nursing students whose family discussed death openly were significantly lower than those of students whose family never done so (F=6.88,P=0.001).In the dimension of natural acceptance,the scores of nursing students with religious beliefs were significantly lower than those of students without (t=2.52,P=0.012) ; the scores of nursing students who gained information of death from mass media were significantly higher than those of nursing students who never done so.(t=-3.85,P=0.000),which was the same in the dimension of approach acceptance (t=-3.48,P=0.001).Conclusions The majority of higher vocational nursing students can naturally accept death reality.Attitude of higher vocational nursing students toward death are influenced by physical and mental health,discussing death in family,family form,religious belief,suicidal thought and news or report about death from the mass media. Key words: Death attitude; Vocational nursing students; Cross-sectional study