This study, using the GoodWork^®Toolkit, explored the impression of role models for today’s nursing students and discussed the effectiveness of role models to develop professional ethics education. Six students discussed a case that asked students to think about influential people who serve as models for good work. Students did not indicate their understanding in having a particular person as their role or mentor. Rather, the students respected their supporters, such as their parents or school teachers, who they believed to help them develop their potentiality. Students thought about what was right or wrong from observing people who were close to them. For professional ethics education, the findings suggested the possibility of situation ethics exposing students more to the realities of the situations.

The purpose was to clarify the feelings behind nurses’ behavior against ethical issues in daily practice. An inductive qualitative study using semi-structured interviews was conducted on 10 ward nurses in their 5th to 10th year of clinical experience. The results showed that the feelings behind their behaviors consisted of “a reflection on their own nursing actions”, leading to “a desire to see improvements in patients’ statuses”, “satisfaction from patients’ favorable responses to nursing care” through their actions, as well as thoughts and feelings that led them to act on ethical issues pertaining to “how they think nursing should be and how they want nursing to be”. Meanwhile, this has resulted in the presence of thoughts and feelings that led to an avoidance behavior toward ethical issues, “negative feelings toward the current situation or toward those who think differently”, which led to “a proactive intention to avoid involvement in issues”, and which nourished a “feeling of guilt in regard to their involvement with patients”. However, the findings showed that by leading to “a reflection on their own nursing actions”, the “feeling of guilt in regard to their involvement with patients” led to actions in regard to ethical issues.

The purpose of this study was to validate an instrument to examine the Japanese nurses’ moral sensitivity. The revised Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire (rMSQ), originally developed and revised by Lützén et al. (2006), was chosen. This rMSQ consists of nine items with three latent factors. A Japanese version of the MSQ was developed by taking the following steps: 1) frequent communications with the author of the rMSQ to clarify the meaning of each item, 2) item reviews by research and clinical expert nurses until the items were confirmed as being easy for Japanese nurses to understand, and 3) translation and back-translation between the two languages. The questionnaire was given to 210 nurses who worked in two different hospitals, of whom 141 responded. A 6-point Likert scale was adopted. A factor analysis extracted the same three factors as Lützén et al. had identified; “Moral Strength”, “Sense of Moral Burden”, and “Moral Responsibility”. The Cronbach’s alfa was .798, .622, and .144, respectively. It was suggested that the conceptual framework of moral sensitivity could be applied to Japanese nurses. However, considering the low coefficient of reliability, items for the subscale “Moral Responsibility” of the Japanese version of the MSQ need further reviewing.