A Pilot Study of a Creative Bonding Intervention to Promote Nursing Students' Attitudes towards Taking Care of Older People

Abstract

Although numbers of older people are increasing, nursing students have negative attitudes towards older people and do not plan to care for them following graduation. Multiple strategies have been implemented to reverse students' attitudes with mixed results. The purpose of this pilot quasi-experimental study was to test a Creative-Bonding Intervention (CBI) with students implementing art activities with older people to promote students' willingness to take care of them. Using a self-transcendence conceptual framework, control (n = 56) and experimental (n = 14) student groups were pre-and post-tested on attitudes toward older people, self-transcendence, and willingness to serve. The CBI improved attitudes towards older people with negative attitudes significantly changed (P = .008) but with no significant differences on self-transcendence and willingness to serve. However, willingness to serve results approached significance (P = .08). The willingness measure (one question) should be expanded. Curricula changes that incorporate creative activities such as the CBI with larger and equal numbers in student groups and longitudinal follow up to determine long-term results after graduation are suggested.

The effect of peer support group on self-transcendence in patients undergoing haemodialysis

“…However, the study was inconsistent with the study of Chen and Walsh (2009) showed that the nursing intervention didn't improve self-transcendence level of the students significantly (Chen and Walsh, 2009). Also in Lamet et al study which assessed the intervention effect for developing perspective of nursing students in elderly care, there was no significant different before and after the intervention in self-transcendence (Lamet et al, 2011) and this differences can be related to the target group of Reed's theory that was the nursing students. Nursing students experience situations of taking care of the elderly during their education repeatedly that can be the reason of the lack of student's selftranscendence increasing level, but in this study and Jadid-Milani's et al study, there were patients who had more vulnerability because of their chronic diseases and they felt more self-transcendence to reach higher life quality (Jadid-Milani et al, 2014).…”

“…However, the study on improving the self-transcendence level and positive attitude to take care of the elderly in nursing students showed that the self-transcendence level had no meaningful changes before and after intervention (Chen and Walsh, 2009;Lamet et al, 2011). The studies showed that self-transcendence has a significant effect on increasing self-care in patients (Mellors et al, 1997;Upchurch and Mueller, 2005), having goals in life (Nygren et al, 2005), and life quality in patients with incurable diseases (Jadid-Milani, 2012).…”

Literature Review: Fostering Undergraduate Student Nurse Engagement in a Bsn Gerontology Course

“…The Creative Bonding Intervention (CBI) showed significant positive change in student nurse attitudes toward older adults and willingness to care for them after students implemented art activities with the elderly [24]. Walton and Blossom [25] noted similar positive experiences with student nurses and older adults who partnered in a home visiting program called Healthy Partners (HP).…”

“…Within the literature review, several studies used the same instruments, while some created tools were specific to individual studies. The similar instruments included Kogan's Attitudes Toward Old People Scale (KATOP), Attitudes Toward Old People (ATOP) questionnaire, and Aging Semantic Differential (ASD) [8,11,13,14,23,24] Neville [26] identified inconsistencies with psychometric characteristics of the eight instruments analyzed. Related concepts are sometimes used interchangeably and incorrectly such as the ASD scale, which interchanges the terms "attitude" with "stereotype".…”

“…Several studies recommend larger more diverse sample sizes to increase generalizability of findings [5,11,12,[22][23][24]. The literature review revealed most research to date focused on undergraduate female students.…”