Turkish nursing students’ perceptions and experiences of bullying behavior in nursing education

Abstract

Objective: This descriptive study aimed to determine the bullying and harassment experiences of nursing students' in various Nursing Schools in Turkey. The types and frequency of bullying behaviors, the sources of bullying behaviors, and students' emotions towards these experiences were investigated.Methods: Study participants were 370 undergraduate nursing students from four different Turkish Nursing Schools. To estimate bullying at nursing school I used a short version of the Negative Acts Questionnaire that adapted according to the earlier studies on bullying against nursing students particularly those conducted by Cooper et al. and Celik and Bayraktar.Results: A total of 222 respondents (60%) reported that they had experienced at least one of the thirteen bullying behaviors at daily and weekly frequencies during the last six months. Work related bullying was the most frequently encountered type of bullying behaviors which is followed by personal related bullying behaviors. Also, an interesting result from this study is that most students reported clinic nurses as their bully, indicating that the perpetrators were mostly females and older than them. Conclusions:This study supports previous reports of bullying against Turkish student nurses and adds to the scant body of literature showing that nursing students often experience bullying and harassment from clinical nurses (horizontal bullying), and importantly, this may influence their future employment choices.

The Association between Bullying Experience related to Clinical Placement and Psychological Well-being in Nursing Students

“…Approximately half of nursing students experienced verbal threats, racism or sexism and more than one third of them witnessed other students being bullied while gaining clinical experience [2]. Another study with 370 undergraduate nursing students in Turkey showed that 60% of them experienced bullying in clinical settings [3]. These findings reflected that nursing students should be considered as a risk group that might tend to be exposed to bullying during their clinical placement.…”

“…Previous studies [2,3,18,19] have been conducted to investigate the prevalence of bullying between nursing students and staffs and to examine the impact of bullying on occupational outcomes. However, there were no studies to examine the association between bullying experience and psychological outcomes in Korean nursing students.…”

Effects of Bullying Experience on Psychological Well-Being Mediated by Conflict Management Styles and Psychological Empowerment among Nursing Students in Clinical Placement: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

“…A higher score indicates a higher level of bullying experience. Reliability tested in a previous study was higher than .80 [9], and…”

“…While a growing body of knowledge [4,9,10] supports the asso-701 www.jkan.or.kr Bullying referred as horizontal violence, interpersonal conflict, incivility, mobbing, and intimidation [4,8,11]. In this study, bullying was defined as act of aggression or hostility perpetrated deliberately or unconsciously by one person on one or more and can repeatedly occur in covert or overt ways over a period of time, which are all unwanted by the victim, but clearly cause humiliation, offence, and distress, and that may threaten the performance of the healthcare team and/or cause an unpleasant working environment.…”

“…Increasing retention of nursing students is essential for shortage in nursing profession, but about a third of new graduate nurses intend to leave their occupation because of experiencing bullying [3]. Due to a high risk of being bullied in clinical placement, nursing students have low level of psychological well-being and do not able to successfully transform from undergraduate students to new graduate nurses [4,5].Appropriate conflict management styles and high level of psychological empowerment are effective methods to help nursing students to reduce detrimental effects of bullying experience [6][7][8].While a growing body of knowledge [4,9,10] supports the asso-701 www.jkan.or.kr Bullying referred as horizontal violence, interpersonal conflict, incivility, mobbing, and intimidation [4,8,11]. In this study, bullying was defined as act of aggression or hostility perpetrated deliberately or unconsciously by one person on one or more and can repeatedly occur in covert or overt ways over a period of time, which are all unwanted by the victim, but clearly cause humiliation, offence, and distress, and that may threaten the performance of the healthcare team and/or cause an unpleasant working environment.…”