EVALUATING NURSES' MORAL REASONING.
Contributors: University of Alberta.
Published: 1993
Number of pages: 268
Subjects: Education, Educational Psychology.; Health Sciences, Nursing.; Education, Tests and Measurements.; Health Sciences, Education.
Description: How can one examine the effectiveness of ethics teaching? Given that there are many difficulties in measuring moral behaviour, most researchers and educators have opted to attempt to evaluate students' moral reasoning. However, this approach has been hampered by the lack of reliable and valid measurement tools. In this exploratory-descriptive study, the central research question was, "Is it possible to design a satisfactory method, using written responses to hypothetical scenarios, to evaluate moral reasoning in student nurses?".

The study was conducted in three phases. The purpose of Phase I was to identify common ethical problems experienced by nurses in practise. Nurses working in an acute care hospital were interviewed and asked to describe ethical problems they had encountered. The identified problems were used in the construction of two hypothetical scenarios. In Phase II, the scenarios were distributed to student nurses and practising nurses, who were asked to provide a written response to each. A total of 37 written responses to each scenario was received. In Phase III, twelve professors and instructors from faculties and schools of nursing across the province were asked to sort the written responses into piles according to perceived quality; they were then interviewed about why they sorted as they did. The objective was to develop a generic "best response" to the ethical problems in the scenarios.

Results showed remarkably little agreement among faculty members as to the quality of responses; answers rated as "best" by some faculty were rated as "worst" by others. In deciding on the morally correct action for the nurses in the scenarios, respondents and faculty were seen to weigh professional/institutional obligations against considerations of "patient as person", in an attempt to balance "beneficence" with the need to "preserve self". How each individual viewed the situation in the scenario was determined by her knowledge, attitudes and values, that is, by "nurse as person", rather than by an agreed-upon professional ethic. The lack of agreement among faculty made it impossible to develop a "best response" to the scenarios. It was concluded that in the absence of a well-developed nursing ethic, reliable and valid evaluation of nurses' thinking about ethical problems is an unachievable goal.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-09, Section: A, page: 3382.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA (CANADA), 1993.

School code: 0351.