Development of a Scale to Assess the Anxiety of Nursing Students Towards a Specific Field Nursing Practicum

Abstract

A draft scale comprised of 31 items to assess the anxiety of nursing students towards a specific “field nursing practicum” was developed. A questionnaire survey was administered to 349 students of four participating private nursing colleges/universities in the metropolitan area of Japan, who were scheduled to participate in the specific field nursing practicum. The questionnaire covers questions about demographics, the Kagoshima University version of the Clinical Stress Questionnaire (CSQ). In total 293 valid responses (261 females, 32 males) were collected. Of the 31 items in the draft scale, we excluded the corrected items where the overall correlation (I-T correlation) was |r| < 0.3 and items where the inter-item correlation was |r| > 0.7. Using the remaining 22 items, an exploratory factor analysis was performed to complete a scale of 19 items in 3 factors. The factors were termed: ‘Anxiety about inter-personal relationships in the practicum’ (1st factor), ‘Anxiety about the own skills in the practicum’ (2nd factor), and ‘Anxiety about nursing activities’ (3rd factor). The goodness of fit of the model by a confirmatory factor analysis; GFI = 0.975, AGFI = 0.968, NFI = 0.960, RMR = 0.084 (p < 0.01). The correlation coefficient between this scale and “threatening emotion issues”, which evaluates anxiety in the CSQ, was 0.53 (p <0.01). A test-retest was conducted with 292 students of the 3 colleges/universities included in the first survey, and 114 valid responses were collected. The test-retest showed an intraclass correlation coefficient to the total score of the anxiety assessment scale of 0.70 (p <0.01), and the Cronbach alpha coefficient of the entire scale was 0.89. These results verify the reliability and validity of the scale to assess the anxiety of nursing students towards a specific field nursing practicum.