Professional Identity of Student Nurses and Graduates

Abstract

In order to examine changes in the nursing professional Identity through careers, a scale of 12 items was constructed through factor analyses and good-poor analyses. Two hundred twenty eight students (1st-3rd grades) of a college of nursing and 442 graduates for the past 13 years responded to the 12 items, with 98% return rate for the former and 65% for the latter.
The results were as follows: 1) The identity was highest among the 1st grade students. 2) It went down drastically by the 2nd grade, but up considerably before the graduation. 3) The identity of graduates just after getting a job was lowest. 4) It increased gradually as the time passed by, irrespective of whether they engaged in nursing and of specialties in nursing.
It is suggested that the development of the nursing professional identity has three distinct stages through careers. Namely, they are the stage of romantic aspiration without knowing the reality of the profession, the stage of disappointment encountering the reality, and the stage of established and stable identity.